Canadian Couch Potato is the closest.
4,185 karma · joined October 8, 2007
By many of my friends and my wife, all of who work in non tech fields but otherwise are 100% apple device people, all seem pretty much not impressed by them.
For Christmas I got my wife a pair of Nothing headphones. They are 1/3 the price and I figured it was worth a try since she basically just stopped using her AirPod Pros.
Now she raves about these cheap Nothing headphones. Tells her friends they are better. Less obtrusive, clear so they stand out less, good audio quality, and they don't try to magically switch devices, they just wait for you to decide what you want them connected to.
They support AAC on Apple, but have not great Bluetooth Audio support for Android.
The kit was sold by a company called Ramsay Electronics. It was 1 watt and with the right antenna (which was quite visible on the roof of my friend's house. They lived right at the top of a hill) it did a good job of covering our small town. There was a brief time when we would get word of several house parties all tuning in when we started to play more dance music late at night. There would be requests from people all through the week at school to play this or that, or call a certain number because someone wanted to say something. This time also coincided with the very first MP3s and I was a "Vice President" of an irc "courier" group, so we could get all the latest stuff!
It only lasted one school year and my friends loved the notoriety, but I used to just sit there and day dream about the audio passing through the low and high pass filters that I had been constantly tweaking, and then being modulated and then re amplified before being pushed out. I still get an excited sensation just thinking about it.
We are just in the opening phases of that change. A big %# isn't the only indicator of change, it's the amount relative to pre-pandemic.
It was part of the wave of new social networks that were to (and did) change how we use software. It was actually really useful and I met many people through it that I never would have otherwise. I count many of them as friends to this day.
"meeting random people and being curious about them and become friends" is a bit of a superpower in your 20s IMO. It's something I, usually by choice of venue (sleep early, eat properly, etc), don't do any more.
It happens a bit with friends-of-your-kids when you get to that stage of life, but the factors of who they are become much more constrained to certain things like schools, neighbourhoods, programs, etc.
To many people in the world these are insidious death machines that lurk unimpeded and can rain down death on entire villages. The embodiment of evil.
Without peeling back the veneer of right and wrong, I think it's worth pausing to both appreciate the wonder of the machine and to consider the implications of its existence.
I would really like to blame how busy I am (new startup, 3 kids, other commitments), however I see my wife who is a physician who works in 2 departments and also teaches and runs a residency program and I know she is quantitatively much busier than I am and has far less control over her time.
However, she manages to read a couple of books a month at least.
I think that during the 2000s/2010s when I was sucking in a firehose of information and learning to consume exclusively in places like HN, she was still researching, studying and learning through long form papers, textbooks and experiments. Our brains are trained on very different cadences.
So when she sits down to read, there is almost no distraction, her comprehension is far better than mine, and she sort of shoots through a chapter with much better momentum than me.
I've recently resolved to stop trying to read anything popular/trendy that I might be attracted to just because it's there and instead only read history, which is my real interest. No more business books or novels I don't really enjoy. That has made a difference and it's already becoming much easier as I am more disciplined about it.
In the end they didn't buy us and the aped everything they learned and launched a carbon copy product 18 months later. rages
... but...
one thing that caught me off guard during the process was that their teams had no idea about developer experience, didn't understand workflows outside their own domain, and didn't pretend to understand any of it.
Honestly the only card they really had to play was being aloof and condescending. Of course we were very deferential to them the entire time, because AWS.
This was one group within what is a massive organization, so YMMV, but if they come knocking my suggestion is to be aloof, kind of a jerk, and don't share anything that isn't on your www. My guess is that would really be what gets their juices flowing.
Often things are very obvious, even notorious, but because we do not want to face the eventuality, we do things like negotiate or perseverate our denials all while the situation escalates.
If NATO and the west are ready and willing to defend Ukraine (I suspect we are not), in which case a significant increase in our own presence would have made sense much earlier.
If we are not willing, then the Ukrainians really should be told that and given an opportunity to negotiate or find their own way.
I'm not sure that Cold War style standoffs via obscurity work the way they used to, there is just too much information available. The job is not to hide information or turn a blind eye to it, but rather to create as much or more activity and information as the opposing side.
https://www.google.com/search?q=gabion+wall
What is going on here? This is a totally bizarre architectural element.
You can easily argue their hegemony lasted at least 60 years.
Amazon's public IPO was 1997. We are now ~20+ years in to their life as a public company.
How do you view Amazon if you believe they have another 40 years of unfettered leadership? How big does this company get? There are very few structural limits to their growth other than this logistics issue. (Ford was hardly unfettered, but as a public company performed much better, over a longer period of time, than the other auto makers).
Different products within the company will have different needs at different times. Without a GM the Twitter Blue team ends up head to head with the Ads team during planning, and you can guess who wins.
Small products will get overly influential GMs who can move mountains within the company to get them what they need. It's less overlord and more political air cover, if done right.
GMs are almost always the first to get fired as well. It's a sort of end-stage of your career at a company. Few GMs can become CEO, so once you take that GM role you are on borrowed time.
There is some discussion about timing and that it's a bad idea to raise before you have a suitable metric that indicates you are on a successful path.
The fulcrum, though, is really: don't be desperate.
How not to be desperate? Don't NEED investment capital, don't NEED more evidence, don't need anything. How to do that: customers and revenue.
That's great advice generally in life. I think on an individual basis it's important to ask yourself "what makes me desperate?"
For many of us it is the need for validation. Validation is HARD to get in the early stages.
I have two daughters (three actually, but this is about two of them). One of them has a very strong ability to get whatever she wants. She's smart and charismatic and thinks/schemes in advance about what she wants. When she gets it however, she consumes/opens/plays with whatever the thing is. She gets her validation from successfully getting that thing and wants to enjoy it.
My other daughter is far less finessed in her approach. She often doesn't get what she wants, however she doesn't want things nearly as often. Why is that? It could be partially because it's harder for her, but I also see that she is far less likely to consume/use an item. She has a place in her room and it has unopened toys, a stack of candy/chocolate. She can go there any time she wants and get an instant hit of sugar/fun/whatever. She has control.
The first kid has to give up a lot and make trades to get what she wants. The second one NEVER compromises. She'll walk before she'll trade.
If you want to "don't be desperate", then you need to understand what drives you to desperation.
Desperation is not a corporate attribute, it is the result of of our own wants, needs and desires. Raising capital is hugely rewarding in many non-core ways for a startup. It validates not just your pitch, but the founder's desire to be actualized/desired/congratulated/admired, etc.
The advice of "don't be desperate" is good advice and the solution IS customers and revenue, but before you get to that stage it is often a question of personality and personal needs. Once you make a "desperate" act however, it's very hard to come back from.
Understand your needs, check them, align them to what is best for the company.
Initially they offered their streaming service at a very competitive price, but I think they have gotten some of the sequencing wrong after that. Initially early subscribers were hit with these up charges for new films. I think Mulan might have been the first one?
It was mid pandemic and they didn't get a chance to release it in theatres, so I think it felt like it made sense at the time and I am guessing they saw it as pretty successful. They quickly started doing it with far less interesting films, and ones that I could see at release time in the theatre.
At home streaming just isn't a "special occasion" like going to the theatre is, and while I was happy to make it a special occasion during the depths of stay-at-home lockdowns, there are a lot of competitive forces now. An extra $20 or $30 might seem to Disney like an amount people will happily pay for every new release, but I think the appetite for that will be pretty low going forward.
Disney also offered an attractive discount for a 1-year subscription initially, so it was pretty easy to do. I've been happy with it, but I notice my kids are on Netflix much much more. That really surprised me.
Now, my subscription renews in April of 2022, but Disney has already started emailing me that it is going to increase almost 50% in cost at renewal time. I don't know why they feel the need to start telling me that so far in advance, or so many times (3 emails now). All it's done is make me thing "ok, that's a lot, let's see if we really use it" and also "hmm, I've spent some $ on these new releases".
They don't seem patient or that they are thinking through this messaging/experience nearly as well as Netflix. Netflix does increase their prices but they do it rarely and they always pummel you with new content around the time they are doing it. They also packaged in lower resolution options, etc so you can keep your costs down if you really want to. Disney hasn't done any of that.