dig6x

Think there’s more nuance to this. Article actually talks about the concept of form and function as appealing to different subsets of mobile consumers. Motivation for surface duo is productivity - the design revolves around this I.e. form derivative of function

Samsung fold on the other hand revolves around the convenience of streaming and gaming, basically having a larger screen for a better experience. A convenience driven design appeals to a broader more general consumer base

Interesting article on social capital as currency and why social platforms delay monetisation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708585

Yeh 100%. The entire premise is that the social offering of FB is free (for the most part, of course users pay in data). I read an interesting article yday on why the 'free' offering of tech companies like FB allows them to thrive versus say an Uber-like tech company that has an explicit cost associated to it even though that is the delivery of a more tangible product i.e. getting from point a to b.

I believe this was a response to people interacting less with the feed and posting less about their own life.. its almost morphed into a reddit cross social feed now. And they're only expanding the bounds more and more, Facebook news if it takes off will also change this significantly once people start sharing more of that content.

It does seem very convenient timing, the article talks about Starbucks spending less than half of its ad spend compared to same time last year. When push comes to shove they are bound to return to one of the biggest advertising platforms.

Facebook in that sense similar to Google as an ad platform. Google has been threatening European publications that are refusing to allow it access to reader data that it will cut them off from the advertising avenues given it already gets permissions through its google accounts.

Seems like privacy laws and social pressure almost morphing into anti-competition sentiment for the big ad platforms.

Yeh the CLoud market was at a stage where the niche with some convenience add could thrive. Now we're seeing all these multi cloud platforms emerge because enterprises are managing multiple server providers at once etc. so you can imagine all the opportunities for horizontal scaling beyond big tech in the industry.

Launched in 2014, its basically a purpose-built SQL cloud data warehouse solution. Its success pivoted among other factors, on its ability to abstract compute power and data storage to create a modular solution that could be made efficient for any data warehousing configuration.

In 2013 AWS augmented its core cloud offering with the introduction of Redshift, a ‘data warehousing as a service’ solution. The Redshift solution bundled compute and storage, reducing the ability to meet individual customer needs to scale either component separately in a cost efficient manner. Not having the option to unbundle compute and storage was inconsistent with the flexible nature that cloud had become known for.

Snowflake’s solution separated storage, compute, and services into separate layers, allowing them to scale independently and achieve greater cost efficiencies. By offering flexibility it was able to better address the requirements of a wider range of customers - who had previously been limited to the more restrictive bundled options, like Redshift.

"...600 billion parameters using automatic sharding. We demonstrate that such a giant model can efficiently be trained on 2048 TPU v3 accelerators in 4 days to achieve far superior quality for translation from 100 languages to English compared to the prior art."

It does appear that at the initial, resource intensive stages of tech like NLP big tech is primed to pave the way. We saw this happen across cloud, AI more generally, storage etc. But big tech then begins focusing on making the tech accessible to industry value chains (Azure, AWS, Amazon's AI services etc.). But as the industry matures there's more room for specialized startups/companies to enter the space to capture lucrative niches - thats exactly what Snowflake did for Cloud.

Definitely see this kind of scale as a step toward a more robust, mature industry if anything. Better it move forward than not.

Quibi claimed to be competing with free and i think thats where they made their mistake. People on Youtube can leave a 10 minute vlog half way and still feel satisfied that they got their fill of quick stimulation. Quibi forces high effort engagement into a snippet of time where that's the last thing you want to be doing. Of course if they aren't competing with free, then they're competing with Netflix and honestly there is no USP on that side either. Its clear that they were exposed on both sides from the get go.

The article says "In preventative healthcare this model is flipped on its head, the entire population becomes a potential customer base. While there is no ceiling to the number of available customers – this model faces the challenge of converting customers on a want-basis rather than a need-basis. The more proactive the preventative tool requires the consumer to be, the harder it is to scale. For this reason, industry players that are able to provide ease of use will be best placed to transform preventative health from a latent desire into a baseline habit, for a larger customer pool."

In fact a move to preventative is mostly the business of habits, i had a non branded sport watch and switched to apple watch recently. Tracking metrics became like a sport in and of itself - especially during runs. I'd be more interested to see how these wearables transition from heavily leaning into the exercise related metrics into even more health functions - what are the possibilities with that?

I suppose rather than shaping the nature of party politics itself it would change how the narrative of either party is shaped. The party can't rely on pandering to extreme realities and perhaps a more complex voter will compel more thoughtful leadership? This does sound like a bit of a stretch however.

This is such a fundamental, but grossly overlooked fact. The spectrum implies that a tether to one ideology (and therefore party) means a tether to all others that fall under the umbrella of that party's stance. The other side is either 'evil' or 'stupid'. It fosters polarization and a basic disrespect for the legitimacy of other people's thought and opinions - this is harmful because it creates a pendulum effect in the cultural narrative and gives rise to extremism on either side. Moderation is underrated.

Read on a business insider article "$130 for access to a game store – a game store largely filled with games that are already available on other platforms, sometimes for less money – is a hard sell." Seems like Google just chucking resources at a "hot" industry... was definitely getting backlash a few months post launch

Think this is contingent on what “bad” means, how extensive are the negative externalities of something like meat farming versus the creation of butter or margarine. In that sense, they’re not comparable examples.