gk1

> My kids light up the most when I am fully engaged with them, fully present, entertaining their ideas, and asking questions.

Exactly. The author didn't mention it but it's not just the bus ride, it's how they engaged with their daughter during that ride.

Remember the mania over the total eclipse in April in the US? I took my daughter on 250-mile roadtrip to see it. The drive took a few hours there, then 9 (!!) hours back because of horrendous traffic. It could've been a tantrum-filled disaster, but I committed to staying upbeat and fully engaged the entire time, and as a result it was a fun and memorable trip we still talk about today.

Oh and we didn't even get to see the eclipse ... 95% cloud coverage.

So yeah step 1 is creating time + space for things like this -- like taking a long bus ride -- but a crucial step 2 is leaning into it with presence and attention to your child.

+1 I read the whole comment and still have no idea what point they’re making or even what side they’re on.

To the grandparent: if you put in the effort to make yourself more clear, you might get the quality responses you wish for.

As much as I can’t stand marketing phrases like “the most advanced we’ve ever made” or “the most powerful yet” — because it should go without saying that the newest thing you’re releasing is also the most of anything — the fact that companies keep using it suggests it actually works to market the thing.

For me the benefit is avoiding distractions while writing. I can’t cmd+f to search my notes but I also can’t cmd+tab to switch to my email tab.

I think you missed their point. Their frugality went beyond what the company size/stage/etc necessitated, and it's because of their upbringing. I'm the OP and I can relate.

I grew up both poor and was an immigrant. My parents took up blue-collar jobs and were themselves trying to understand how things work in this country. I grew up in a community of immigrants so all my friends were in the same boat.

If you don't have anyone in your life who goes on business trips or tells you about their white-collar job and how things work, how are you supposed to know? Well, through your own experience! Which unfortunately involves doing something stupid at first and learning a lesson from it.

No offense taken. :)

Steve is extremely nice and probably didn't want to push the issue. Also, their monthly fee to me made the travel cost insignificant, and he knew that.

In my defense, this stuff just isn't taught anywhere. That day I was one of the 10,000 people who learned something that "everyone knows." (https://xkcd.com/1053/)

There's another story where I worked for the Dept of Defense and on my first work trip I stayed in a run-down Howard Johnson motel in the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama, because I thought we were supposed to book the cheapest possible lodging.

Turns out the policy was we had to book the cheapest rental car, but for hotels we could just get the standard government rate at any hotel chain like Marriott or Hilton. So while my coworkers cozied up on 500-threadcount sheets I watched a car get repossessed outside my window while the front desk receptionist was stealing my card on file. :)

For me the critical moment was recognizing I had burnout. It happened when I saw this post on HN, whose list of symptoms almost perfectly matched what I was feeling: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/03/29/how-people-fall-ap...

I’ve obviously heard of burnout and experienced it before, yet somehow I failed to recognize what was happening until then.

So thank you for posting this. Hopefully it’ll help someone out there realize they’re burned out and start addressing it.

Products like Cursor literally have a dropdown that lets you switch between models seamlessly. From the surveys I’ve seen, most companies already use more than one model provider. The switching cost is fairly low.

A good sales person will find your manager. “Hi, I see containedgravel and two others from your team are already testing [product] for [use case] in order to [benefit]. If you have 30 mins this week I can show you how to add governance, how to model and reduce your costs, and introduce you to our solutions engineers to help with a smooth rollout.”

And the first thing the manager will do is turn to their engineers and ask, “So, what do you think of [product]?” And that will determine whether the manager takes the call or not. Which is why winning over the engineer is critical.

It’s not universally true but some of the comments here play into this stereotype perfectly.

Simple app I made to practice using Cursor with Anthropic. The last time I made a web app was >10 years ago, and this took me just 4 hours. PRs welcome: https://github.com/gkogan/letmeplexthat

Thank you. :) I don’t think of it as social media marketing but more of helping our target audience learn useful things. Yes that requires they actually find the articles which means sharing it on social, being mindful of SEO, and so on.

Probably our learning center is what you’re thinking of. https://www.pinecone.io/learn/ … The blog is more of a news ticker for product and company news.

That’s the point, nobody should expect them to.

Once they’re using the product they can see their actual usage and cost metering. So they can either extrapolate that to larger scale or test it at scale for a short time to see hourly/daily cost and then extrapolate for the month or year.

In other words it’s not much of a burden and they get much more reliable information.

There's a simpler explanation: The authors of your linked post purposefully set up Pinecone to be as expensive as possible in their test.

No pricing calculator or benchmark post (from a competitor, no less) will replace just trying the service yourself.

Yes, with the default theme. I deserve zero credit for it.

(Author here)

> Does it also mean that in real world usage, one slight misinterpretation or misevaluation of your metrics and you're liable to 1000x more than you planned to?

Unlikely. You can see why in these two examples that really happened:

One user I spoke with said they assumed "queries per second" is calculated by (number of searches) x (top-k for each search), where "top-k" is the number of results they want back. I don't remember their top-k but let's say it's 10 -- so they were entering a value for "queries per second" that was 10x higher than it should be and they'd see an estimate around 10x higher than they'd really be charged.

Another user thought you get "number of vectors" by multiplying the number of embeddings by the embedding dimensionality (1,536 is a common one). So they were entering a value literally 1,536x higher than they should've. Their actual usage would be calculated (by Pinecone) correctly and not be that high.

Vector dimensionality is a basic concept for AI engineers and QPS is a basic metric for DB admins, but Pinecone sees lots of users who are either new to AI or new to managing DBs or both.

Congrats (from Pinecone) on the launch! The e-commerce and media recommendation space desperately needs an AI-based solution without the lead-filled baggage of legacy search or recommender systems.

> 100M+ Users I assume you mean 100M+ end-users have interacted with a site or product that uses your technology. The way it's phrased sounds like you're saying Shaped itself has 100M+ users which of course it doesn't. Consider replacing that with "100M+ interactions" or something.

I've tried that maybe once or twice in the past decade. It was a lot of work to set up. And while it made tallying up results easier (like a poll), it didn't nearly provide as much insight as open-ended answers did.

I kept doing this for the past 7 years and can confirm: it's still true.

Thanks! I recently moved the blog to Ghost and some stuff didn't carry over. It's there now.

(Author here)

What I've learned, after hundreds of convos with developers sparked by emails like this, is that many people are happy that someone from the company is interested in their project and their opinions.

Those who feel that way are glad to get this and they're glad that there's no burden on them to get on a call or schedule a zoom or fill out a questionnaire or even click out of their email client.

And those who don't want to be bothered, well at most they've lost 5 seconds of their day to read the email start to finish.

In other words I think this fairly symmetric... Low effort and high value on both sides.

In the 2000’s it used to feel sketchy to buy things online. I think this apprehension about “AI” inside products will fade away.

With that said, your whole value proposition can’t be just “we have AI.” You should still talk about the desired outcomes your product helps achieve. The fact that it uses AI is just part of “how it works,” which is secondary.

And sometimes the “how it works” is better left unsaid. For example, Amazon’s logistics operation is out of this world, with robots and AI and incredibly sophisticated supply chains… But people only care that their stuff arrives in 2 days.

It's possible they want to position it as something other than a search engine, like "answer engine" or "personal agent" or whatever, even if what it's meant to do is replace the traditional search engine.

This announcement doesn't mention a price, but the scoop by Calcalist last week says "many hundreds of millions of dollars and could even reach $1 billion." Good for them. (https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rkmbe9e0p)

Here you go: https://www.pinecone.io/blog/pinecone-vs-pgvector/

To add to the other recommendations, here's a primer on vector DB's: https://www.pinecone.io/learn/vector-database/

OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere

Maybe it was edited later, but the post now says "(>$10M)". I interpret that as $10–19M. That's not great for a product that's been around for 9 years.

I consulted a similar company in their space ~5 years ago. What I found was that the way to make money in K8s automation/monitoring is to position it as a security solution. That's what Snyk did and they've been killing it, reaching $7B valuation as of last year. Both the company I was advising and Weave.works decided to stick to the developer productivity story and unfortunately both have now shut down. There are many factors to a company's success but it doesn't help to be positioned as a solution that's seen as just a "nice-to-have" or part of a "best practice."

If you yearn for “the good old days,” consider that we’re living through “the good old days” of AI. In 30 years a blog post like this will poke fun at prompts, chatGPT, chat-with-docs apps, dealing with hallucinations, and what else?