colinplamondon

Cosign on the AirPods Max. I'll easily use them daily for 4 years, and then someone else will enjoy the hell out of them.

It makes music even more beautiful.

The noise cancelling is absurdly good.

Mic quality is great.

They're incredibly comfortable for long work sessions.

The little buttons and dial are a joy to click and press.

The case everyone made fun of? It's awesome. By being forced to put them away, it always shuts off when not in use. The mic doesn't drain like every Bose I've ever ad. Fantastic product.

If you want to set the line, I’ll take the over on “Notion succeeds”

This!

The design decision to feel "default-text" is awesome - text is a great foundation for a "custom workspace" product. But, it's only when the bulk of content is in Tables that things get extremely powerful.

Once Notion has in-line text references, ala Coda, the sky is really the limit. I think Notion nailed the UX and speed / performance.

Even if it's slow compared to Apple Notes, it's lightning fast compared to Coda, where "Documents" are extremely heavy, and relatively isolated.

Notion has a clean route towards eating Coda's most powerful functionality ([an incredible charting and formula](https://coda.io/formulas)). That's the kind of thing that a company as well-financed as Notion can dedicate a team to, and make incredible progress on.

Similarly, They can eat Coda's in-line text references, so your text can live-link to information in tables. A matter of resource allocation.

Coda, on the other hand, started from an "easier application builder" approach, like Retool for Excel experts. That's brilliant and powerful, but the UX creates a bigger dividing line between consumers and creators.

Notion feels enough like a normal word processor that consumers start doing crazy things without realizing it.

I think it really is that unique - Notion blending read/write is pretty revolutionary for an app like this. Wiki's are obsessed with toggles between read/write mode.

Those apps you mention - Drupal, Wordpress, etc - have write modes that exist in backends with alien experiences to the read modes.

By unifying read/write into a single continuous UI, with built-in relational databases usable by non-technical users, Notion really does let people create damned powerful custom apps.

If you squint, you can see how Notion looks a lot like the next version of the Internet. By hyper-focusing on company intranets they miss out on the power of connected workspaces ("domains"), but the thinking is there.

I'll be seriously surprised if Notion isn't looked back on as a breakthrough paradigm shift.

If a founder as successful Zsu came in extremely drunk one time, yeah, I think extend him some grace. He fucked up - once. That's ok!

Did he kill someone? No. Did he lose a major customer account? No. Did he fire a top employee in a drunken rage? No.

He's under a lot of pressure and fucked up in an embarrassing way once. That doesn't mean he has a substance problem. It means he had a bad day.

If it happens a second time? Yeah, ok, now it's starting to be a track record. Third? Nuke him.

It's ok for people to fuck up sometimes

He founded a company worth billions - if he was constantly showing up high, sure. Getting dosing wrong, once? As long as he learned from the experience, who cares?

This is the kind of incident that plays well in the press, because it generates headlines - like becoming the first word of a headline.

Do we really think that the board was so gosh-darn offended that their founder did the wrong LSD dose, once? Or, that there were long-standing disagreements over strategy, direction, and tone?

The latter is harder to justify in the normie press, so they're trying to crucify him over some minor incident.

iOS customers are far higher income and spend more money - they're way more valuable. You get more revenue per user with way lower support costs. From a demographic standpoint it's a no-brainer.

I couldn't disagree more. I absolutely LOVE VimCal, and one of the reasons for that is the menubar functionality.

Showing a countdown to my next meeting in my menubar, with one click video join, is super useful. The app itself shows how much room for improvement in calendar apps there is - their availability sharing and time travel features are consistently deeply helpful

This is all to say, I think this product approach has a lot of merit. I primarily use Vimcal in its "App Mode", not its "Menubar Mode", but its menubar mode is super valuable.

I happily pay Vimcal $15/mo, and love seeing in the space. Google Calendar and iCal are fucking terrible. I hope the SuperPowered guys crush it.

That points to the problem of open source: a hostility towards growth and product as critical team roles. It makes sense - OSS is an opportunity to do great engineering without constraints of a workplace. But without prioritizing product, growth, and design, OSS consumer products stagnate and suck as an end user.

Shifting from GitHub Issues as the default project management is a good prime candidate for starting to move the needle. Public-facing Clubhouse-the-project-management-app would be easier for non-eng contributions, holding open OKR processes, and having some clear ways for non developers to contribute.

Fwiw I tried to help on growth / product on one consumer OSS product I love- there just wasn’t a mechanism for someone to say yes, and there was a need for centralization to do some of the obvious next practices any startup would do. It’s easy for engineers to contribute, but ambient hostility and concern about marketing / growth / product tactics make it tough to turn rock solid OSS technology into competitive OSS products.

Engineer pushback on this was MASSIVE in 2010-2012. There was still a Wild West ethos, so it cost a lot of goodwill to ship the feature. We did it anyways - it was the obvious right thing for the business. Getting there was one of the most heated feature debates I've encountered.

At this point in the App Store cycle, most app developers I know would aggressively "review flush". It sounds like the OP wasn't familiar with the growth strategies common at the time.

If your star average goes below 4.5, put out a quickie point release. That would reset the reviews, and the review prompt would drive a 5 star instantly.

IIRC, I'd also divide all the users into buckets, and stage out review prompts by week. You never want negative reviews stacked alongside each other in the review list. Multiple negative reviews is the kiss of death for conversion - rank drop could happen fast.

By staggering review prompts, you'd get positive reviews rolling in every single week, with a surge up front.

Obviously, that doesn't mean _ignore_ the negative reviews. Those are generally critical product failures. That necessitates response. We'd group and measure review categories, and reach out to affected users to see how they felt about potential and shipped solutions. Product quality is step one on good reviews.

None of that means setting your business on fire because of negative reviews. At the same time it's a critical signal to be dealt with, there's an immediate business problem of minimizing or eliminating the impact of negative reviews.

They're two different swim lanes requiring two different processes.

Moon is a Harsh Mistress is definitely what I look to too, also. Even if the US is becoming more authoritarian over time, it's far from the worst Great Power. We do deeply, deeply shitty, immoral things constantly.

Compared to the Soviets, Mao, German Reich #2 / #3, Napoleonic France... the world could do worse for the First nation to take the moon.

Whoever controls the gravity well controls the world - I'd sure as hell rather that be my team, and not the other team.

There are no effective international institutions. The human race hasn't figured out any way to unify on a global level. There are no world police - just scattered teams with nukes at each others' throats.

If history is any indication, being on the losing team means being on the wrong side of obliteration and conquest. Being on the winning team matters - a lot.

This is the prisoner's dilemma, without any benefit to cooperation. The US has the wealth and the industrial base to spread throughout the solar system faster and more aggressively than anyone else.

Whoever militarizes space first controls every other nation's access to space, and has the ability to deny access to opposing nations.

I'm thankful the US is doing it before China.

I don't mean to take anything at all away from Obama pushing COGS, as opposed to the old Constellation strategy. That was an incredible, bold move.

Besides SLS, though, it didn't move meaningful industry outside of LEO. It was an important step, but didn't fundamentally move us past the post-Apollo Space Shuttle funk. The Asteroid program was potentially interesting for getting mining going, but small in scale, with long timelines.

Artemis is the first time NASA has run on aggressive, tight timelines since Apollo. They're shooting for achievable, inspiring objectives -- quickly. And this time, we'll have THREE architectures that can get any American or American ally to the surface of the moon for a price.

Gateway guarantees long-term government spend in Lunar orbit, just like the ISS guaranteed long-term government spend in Earth orbit. Artemis aligns government spend towards the industrialization and militarization of space, on terms beneficial to the US.

Space Force has far more visibility, and an institutional need to collect more budget, spend more on personnel, and build their fiefdom.

As they do that, they'll consume more and more private services, and help spur more and more industry in space. For me, that's a huge, huge win.

I'm blown away by this administration on spaceflight, in the best way possible. Space Force is a huge step forward for building capabilities in space, on the military side. On the civilian side, Bridenstine is shaping up to be the greatest Administrator in NASA history.

Under his watch we're getting multiple, re-usable, private launch architectures and human spaceflight capabilities.

Plus, significant infrastructure in lunar orbit, forcing the ISS budget out of LEO.

All under complete American control.

Especially right now, communication is moving more and more online. Online communication is increasingly mediated by corporations.

If our speech is mediated by corporations, and those corporations tell us what we can and cannot say, what good is freedom of speech?

Companies like YouTube take advantage of their economies of scale to offer video services for free. To be able to do that, they had to dump services at a loss for years funded by venture capital.

How can you build a meaningful paid platform, while a VC-backed company spends tens of millions on R&D at a loss?

The argument thus far is that this is in the consumer's interest - free services at a high quality. That dumping being good for the consumer is contingent on the business being able to monetize with advertising.

If YouTube couldn't make money with ads, they'd have to charge for their services - opening them up to competition. VC backed businesses offering consumer products for free is most certainly dumping. So far, that dumping has been to consumer's benefit. YouTube's behavior is reversing that benefit.

There's also a lot of other options they could go with, all of which would be far less un-American.

1) A Reddit-like quarantine system, and eat the cost of hosting (like Reddit does)

2) Require Ickes to pay for his own hosting on YouTube, at YouTube's favorable pricing and peering contracts.

3) Enable a separate ad ecosystem for quarantined content.

This might be me missing some awesome projects, but I haven't heard of many other projects with Urbit's scale of ambition and scope.

WWW is so powerful, everything exists within it. There's not much competition at the OS layer, and virtually none at the protocol level.

This is so intensely cool.

Urbit was on its own island until recently - the only project challenging the domination of WWW.

This + Tildeverse feels like the very, very, very early days of hackers starting to play with alternate protocols, and the style and format of WWW.

It's fun, non-commercial, social, and aimed at hobbyists - just like the early WWW.

Given another 10 years of experimentation, I could 100% imagine WWW being seen as corporate, commercial and professional space.

Right now there isn't a good pseudonymous layer, because everything is very tied to real identity. Privacy doesn't really exist in a world of shadow profiles. And, with my commercial hat on, not do I want it to. I want to be able to retarget the shit out of email lists, and run intensive Facebook ad campaigns.

The needs of commercial space are not the needs of personal space. One solution could be different protocols, or at least different spaces, for each.

This also implies New Glenn won't be ready in time, or human rated in time, for 2024. New Glenn is supposed to be even more powerful than the Falcon Heavy.

That said, even if they could have New Glenn ready , it's probably super smart to tie themselves to some of the legacy aerospace companies.

It aligns a whole lot of lobbyists behind Blue Origin's bids, and brings with it a lot of expertise on the bidding process.

Blue Origin's relationship with legacy aerospace feels a lot like Microsoft and IBM.

15m of Googling after seeing the press on this announce - definitely not pretending to be an expert.

But - let's assume that cursory look at primary clients is correct. It appears they're all government agencies. They don't sell much to private business.

The things that make SpaceX and Blue Origin so interesting is that it utterly bucks the government procurement model, making them riskier ventures.

SpaceX and Blue Origin maintain their own product roadmaps, based on their own reading of the marketplace, what technology can do, and their long-term vision.

These other contractors, like Lockheed, General Dynamics, and apparently Dynetics, have an inherently mercenary business model. They only respond to contracts already out on the market - there's little to no incentive for them to blaze a path forward.

They win on graft, running up the bill on cost-plus contracts, and taking advantage of the procurement process that wastes trillions.

The defining question to me - why didn't Boeing or Lockheed build reusable rockets?

Blue Moon started work far before this contract awarded a dime. Same with Starship. These guys have made their money off SLS - a snakepit of corruption and waste.

I'd feel the same way about any company that's primarily a government contractor. There's a big difference in approach between the military-industrial companies, and "New Space" companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX.

First, Blue Moon is doing some really interesting things with regularizing access to the Moon. Clear adapters, clear pricing, it's as much a leap forward as what SpaceX has done with regularizing access to orbit.

From a scale standpoint, it also plays it safe. No exponential increase in tonnage over Apollo, but an exponential increase in costs and private access. That's all interesting as all hell, and props to the Blue Origin team.

Second, Starship is just insanely fucking cool. It's maybe one of the most ambitious generation on generation leaps ever attempted, by any team of human beings ever. It's aiming to skip from the Bronze Age to the Industrial Age overnight. The sheer scale of ambition is just breathtaking.

Dynetics, on the gripping hand, is... yet another government contractor. Taking a government contract. Developing a paint by numbers solution. Again. Just like SLS. And the Space Shuttle. And Constellation. And Ares. And every other slab of corporate welfare has doled out over the past 40 years.

To project my opinions onto OP, I can't imagine Dynetics' contribution here is getting anyone too hot and bothered.

That or $0.02 on the dollar in bankruptcy court.

Man, that's the entire reason I read /r/worldnews. A ton of people compete to have the best recap on why something is relevant, and the best rises to the top.

Like, the point of comments is people putting out their opinions. In the process some people post who are more informed, and others less. Give it a few hours, and you can skim the top comments, and get a damned decent read on a situation.

If someone didn't want someone else to interpret an article, why'd they even bother reading comments?

- Focus and elevate video content. Entire TV episodes are sometimes made public on Twitter - there's no way to surface this. When The Expanse has a new episode, it should go into a tab that's YouTube on Twitter.

- Pay video creators out the ass to get them to dual-publish from YouTube, and create auto-sync features that let them publish in both locations. Build in live-streaming functionality to compete with Twitch.

- "Async realtime". When watching a show, make it possible to replay Homeland tweets from the time you start. If you watch an Apple Keynote later, make the realtime tweets replay, and make it possible to add your own.

- Allow different engagement models. If someone has a whiff of abuse in their feed, make it trivial for them to see only verified + low risk users. The moment someone sends an @message to someone they've never conversed with with a single abusive word, crank the risk on them. If someone wants to engage with the firehose, make that the default.

- Make it easy to "import" feeds. I've had at least 3 friends ask me who to follow, and then we spend 15 minutes scrolling through my follow list, they manually look them up. When a new user registers on Twitter, I should be able to pick 3 people I'm most interested in following, and it should then recommend the people they like the most.

- It should be one-click to "super follow" someone, and get all their follows into my feed. Make it trivial to get an awesome, active feed. And trivial to reduce noise when I'm not interested in something.

Half of the entire article is about the difficulties of acquiring the (Chinese!) device, him trying to figure out if this is actually a real device (only made in China!), and eventually going direct to a factory (which is in China!).

Read first, virtue signal second.

This is national media, for a local business - the audience of this is 100% investors, for the round they mention raising.

Personally, I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit". There's got to be a line where the safety net gives out, because someone is too expensive to help.

That's where family and charity hopefully take over.

At the same time, I think your instinct is right, and it's something I've never heard mentioned before. It's almost inevitably that there'll then be the "food security" fund, and the "housing guarantee" fund.... and then we've just recreated the existing system.

That's the best argument against BI I've heard, and one I'd love to hear rebuttals to.

There's lots of great compensation negotiation guides for engineers. This one just happens to be for employers.

Just want to throw out, I love your comment. Positive, understanding, while directly questioning on a serious issue.