lsc

relevant experience:

So I've started to subscribe/unsubscribe to channels through prime. It's really easy to subscribe/unsub. I unsubscribed from HBO when game of thrones finished.

But... lots of things? lots of things unsubscribing is horribly painful.

A lot of things you have to call someone, listen to the sales pitch, look up a bunch of customer data you might not have anymore, and then listen to another sales pitch and then cancel.

I have started dealing with this by just canceling the credit card. (I've got one of those cards that lets me generate throw away numbers, so I don't have to cancel everything) way easier.

So, uh, my guess? my guess is that the 'subscribe to movie through amazon' is a lot less sticky than 'subscribe to channel through cable' just 'cause it's three clicks. And then another three clicks if you want to re-subscribe.

>Even in the case of open-source software, with full source code and documentation available, the number of people who analyze code is miniscule.

I think... we might just live in different worlds? I'm a sysadmin and I maintain computers, but I am surrounded by serious programmers (I mean, kernel and system verilog types, not frontend people)

I have worked places where it was just me and the frontend folks, and in that case? yeah, It's kinda lonely when you need help on anything serious. But even then, with my social life being what it is now, I'd have people to ask if I was in that situation again at work.

I... usually don't have any trouble getting someone qualified to look at my backtraces when I have kernel panics, and I usually don't have trouble getting those people to give me patches. that requires analyzing the code.

I mean, sure, people don't spend a lot of time reading random code for no reason... but you give them a clue that something interesting is somewhere, and my experience? you can get plenty of help.

>Without commenting on whether or not I believe the Bloomberg story, I very much doubt that "people were tearing these boards apart", doing reverse hardware-level engineering looking for an unknown. Even in the case of open-source software, with full source code and documentation available, the number of people who analyze code is miniscule.

I can tell you people were literally tearing them apart; cutting open capacitors and the like (common place to hide extra components) pulling apart power supplies (as I recall, one of the bloomburg illustrations implied that something was in a power supply; I remember a long discussion of how you could compromise something over i2c from a chip actually in the psu) - I mean, sure, these things could be better hidden to the point where such techniques would be ineffective, but my reading of the bloomburg article was that they weren't particularly well-hidden, and that therefore they were discovered. Hiding that sort of thing from another EE who designs that sort of thing seems like it's probably pretty difficult.

(I mean, it is common to have compromised firmware; that's way easier. but that's also not what the bloomburg article was about)

But... yeah, I guess a lot of my assumption was based on my reading of the bloomburg article implying that this hardware was something tacked on in a detectible way; the sort of thing that could be done by some third-tier subcontractor. I acknowledge that if your attacker has the capability to produce ASICs that look just like the real thing and act just like the real thing out the same I/O pins, except in some rare case? yeah, that's not going to fall to this level of examination. but that wasn't my reading of the bloomburg story.

Furthermore, if an attacker went through that level of effort, they'd probably not just do it for supermicro. Most motherboards of the same generation are pretty similar; pretty heavily based on reference designs. If you were going to do something that sophisticated, that's where you'd attack.

If you were going to attack just one particular rev of one particular brand of a motherboard? well, something tacked on seems a lot more feasible.

so by my reading of the article, it was extra chips... as I recall, it looked like some of them were hidden in the power supply (totally possible, if you can find some exploit on the I2C interface, but also probably fairly easy to detect)

(the story was that it was a Chinese subcontractor. Remember that SuperMicro is a Taiwanese company; I'm pretty sure that SuperMicro has less Chinese made content than any of the other major manufacturers of commodity server kit. )

I did know people cutting open power supplies, cutting open capacitors (a place chips have been hidden in the past) and otherwise examining the systems at the macro level.

I also knew people who managed networks of these things... and one of the bloomburg stories, as I recall, claimed that the hack was discovered via looking at the network as the BMC tried to phone home.

I mean, yes, you could do something more clever than that, replace a chip with one that looks identical, which uses the same traces that did something different, but the article certainly implied it was a more simple sort of thing.

I mean, if I was trying to compromise a BMC in that way, I'd just flash it with firmware that did what I needed (and this has happened before... to many different vendors) - my understanding of the bloomburg story was that there was some bit of hardware to re-flash the firmware to the compromised version after the user upgraded to a non-compromised version.

Huh. so shortly after the story broke, I bought a bunch of SMCI. (It's actually the first OTC stock I've ever bought. It was easier than I thought, too... I had to call vanguard to enable OTC trading, but after that? super easy.) I sold it months later, at a pretty good profit, mostly 'cause while I think the bloomburg accusations are clearly false, there are huge accounting irregularities surrounding supermicro; getting delisted is no joke, and I'm super not qualified to evaluate that sort of risk.

but, my reasoning? my reasoning was that if it was a widespread physical hack, someone would discover it fairly quickly; I mean, people were tearing these boards apart, looking for anything. There's no way they could keep that quiet, even if they were willing to disappear people.

I can tell you that within my peer group, Bloomberg has taken a pretty huge reputational hit. I mean, sure, we all still read 'money stuff' because it's "the daily show" for financial news. It's great entertainment, and moderately edifying. But, you know, it's one of those things where after a newspaper writes about something in your field, you start wondering if they are that ridiculously uninformed about the things that aren't in your field.

So, I felt really pretty safe with buying in the dip.

Huh. your experience is really different from mine. To me, the fact that we survived seems like a huge accomplishment; learning about the cold war and how we did not all die violated everything else I learned in history (and, for that matter, in everything I learned about human nature from high school.)

I remember the first political news, perhaps, that I really remember mattering (and understanding that it mattered) was the fall of the Berlin wall. I mean, I was like nine, so I didn't fully understand why it mattered, but I understood that it did matter.

But, I've always been into history, and I read a lot about it later.

Whenever I read about the period I'm overcome with just how quickly humanity developed restraint.

If we had any war in the second half of the 20th century that was at all like either of the major wars in the first half of the 20th century, humanity would be no more. If we had leaders of major powers in the second half of the 20th century who were as brutal and stupid as the leaders of the first half of the 20th century, we would not exist.

In just a few years, we went from expending all of our power, pouring every last ounce of effort and ingenuity into killing the enemy to the firing of MacAurther.

It's amazing, and really life-afferming in a lot of ways. Whatever you think of human nature, the fact that when faced with the actual choice, our leaders hesitated is huge. They resisted. rationality won out, and we continue to exist in this increasingly unlikely world.

I think there's a huge difference between risking bankruptcy and risking your freedom. I mean, even leaving aside the traders who trade other people's money, even if it's your cash, once you were rich, even if you go bankrupt, you are still better off than tha vast majority of Americans, just due to your contacts and education. I mean, the difference between being a rich trader and being a mediocre IT dude are way smaller, say, than the differences between being a mediocre IT dude and being in jail.

(I actually know a few guys who went the failed trader -> IT dude route)

You realize that "money laundering" usually isn't about tax evasion, right? it's about figuring out how to take money gotten from an illegal venture and figuring out how to make that money come from a trackably legitimate source, which means paying taxes on it

So, having a lower tax rate, all other things equal, is going to make your state a more attractive destination for money laundering.

What about amazon fresh? That seems like ridiculous levels of luxury to me. I mean, this is America and most of us have giant vehicles we could take to the store to get food... but amazon will deliver fresh food to your door. You don't even have to talk to anyone; they'll stack it by your door and you can deal with it when you get home. (The Safeway service makes you be there and makes you sign papers... a lot more work)

(I personally don't really relate luxury to good customer service... Luxury, to me, is about convenience and comfort. If you have to deal with customer service at all, they've blown it. But then, I guess I don't really understand the concept of loyalty, either, at least when it comes to corporations, so we might just be talking past oneanother.)

>Amazon is a shitty aggregate selling site.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was complaining about. The "shipped and sold by amazon.com" experience is super luxury. For consumer goods, and a whole lot of industrial parts? I have next-day access to a giant warehouse of stuff. I'd pay a lot extra for that. They cheapen that by adding in the shitty aggregator capabilities. (though, like I said, the biggest problem is mixing reviews, and making it hard to limit your search to just 'shipped and sold by amazon' - when looking at a listing, an experienced user can easily see if it's amazon or a shady third party)

A lot of my friends have big storage units full of stuff for projects, books they found that they want to read at some point, etc, etc... things we have bought before we needed them because we didn't know that those things would be available when we needed them.

As amazon gets better, there are more and more classes of things I don't need to own until the day before I need them. For those of us who live in areas where storage or living space costs way more than "stuff" - this is huge.

Think about a world where we don't have to go shopping. Especially where we don't have to go exploratory shopping, where you don't have to buy the things you will need ahead of time.

(actually, I mean, this is a very silicon valley perspective; I visit family members elsewhere in the USA, and it is so weird to me that one day shipping isn't available if I forgot to pack a thing I needed. At that point, it becomes a lot less luxury.)

I don't own amazon (except through the indices) but I am a customer who buys almost all of my consumer goods through amazon. You are absolutely right.

Amazon is a luxury brand, and amazon doesn't seem to know this. I mean... it really is a pretty great luxury brand? There's a lot of crap I don't have to own if I know I can order it the day before, and I'm willing to pay extra for that convenience.

I mean, there's three tiers of amazon stuff.

1. "Shipped from and sold by Amazon.com" amazon amazon

2. "Sold by X, fulfilled by Amazon" - like ebay, but with fast shipping and reliable returns

and

3. "Shipped and sold by X" - like ebay, except you use the amazon interface.

I mean, really, for me, someone who buys everything on amazon, these markings are clear enough for situations where it's a common item that I don't need to read reviews. If I had ownership of amazon, though, I'd be pissed, 'cause they are pissing on their own brand by not making it super clear when they are actually selling the thing and when they are just acting as ebay for some maybe super shady third party.

(I mean, it may seem like the prime check solves the problem, but this is what I mean by it being a luxury brand. I don't want to have to deal with shiping something back when it wasn't quite exactly the right item or whatever; shipping stuff back is a pain

But amazon has a massive problem of mixing reviews for products in those three categories, and quite often, you end up with reviews for product X which are actually reviews for product Y or product Z that users got when trying to buy product X from a seller that was not amazon, because the reviews are mixed.

It makes amazon a lot less useful for stuff where I need reviews; things like generic brand stuff. There's just no way to reliably line up the review to the version of the product being sold.

I mean, right now? when amazon is willing to do all this shit for near cost? It doesn't really matter, 'cause they are naturally going to be better than most of the competition that has to keep their P/E below 20; It's easy to run a business if you don't have to make money.

But at some point, investors will demand returns.

>Very few companies include bonus as a part of a software engineer's compensation (large SV companies are more or less alone in this). Bonuses are generally reserved for executives (excluding sales staff, of course) in most industries, including mine (defense).

Yup, that's what I'm saying. I'm just a sysadmin; I'd never gotten a bonus in my 20 years working as a programmer or sysadmin, mostly at tier 3 tech companies... not until I started working at a FAANG company these last few years, but the bonus + equity is a really significant portion of my compensation now, and brings the whole package from "nicely comfortable for someone who didn't go to college" to "wow"

>Sillicon valley is more then google and apple

It is... but the top tier companies pay dramatically more than the next tier down. Like, we're talking 30-50% difference once you count total comp.

(it's interesting, base salary is somewhat comparable... but stock and bonus are a big part of comp if you work at a FAANG company, and those... largely don't exist at third-tier companies.)

The top-tier employers also do a lot to bring up salary pressure on the lower tiers; if the FAANG companies didn't pay so much, the most desirable people wouldn't leave the lower paying companies, wouldn't make room for someone less desirable, etc... That's how I got my start; I didn't go to college, but I did work my way up through those smaller companies, into larger companies that paid better and better.

really? huh. I have a pretty strong preference for santa clara water, but that might be me confusing it with the Milpitas smell. I mean, there are a lot of good places to eat in Milpitas, but the Milpitas smell just really puts me off.

sure, but buying random bottled water is probably about as common as buying a random brand of cigarettes. People have preferences.

>I kind of want these issues to continue and get worse. Because then we will have a healthcare revolution, rather than more bandaid policy fixes.

This is the justification I hear for a lot of my "bernie or bust" friends. I always just assumed they were trying to justify voting themselves tax cuts. I mean, in a revolution, those of us in the tech sector... I don't see it going well for us. Normal people hated us before we became the new "upper class" - if it ever becomes acceptable to go around killing "rich" people - I bet we'll be among the first.

the problem is that this means we end up with trump, who teams up with a lot of people who think that it's good that people without good jobs don't have access to healthcare.

most places seem to offer ceramic for sit-down customers? I mean, maybe not starbucks; most Starbucks I've been in don't really seem to have much of a sit-down area, so "for here or to go" isn't really a question. But most nicer places have them; it seems to go with having seating.

I personally have a strong preference for ceramic (not enough to carry my own, but when I'm going to be in a place, I ask for a ceramic cup, simply because it is a more pleasurable experience than a to go cup)

I am pretty sure that you could tell the difference between a brand of water that is distilled + minerals added and a brand of water that was not distilled in a blind taste test, especially if you drink mostly water.

I think there are even pretty big differences, say, between the tap water in Santa Clara and the tap water in Milpitas, for example.

I mean, If your argument is that bottled water is wasteful, I'm not disagreeing, but I am saying that if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste.

People do, though; There is a thriving market for (heavy and expensive) stuff built to last a really long time. Obviously, if you want your product to be light and/or cheap, especially if (as in my case) your light product is supporting something very heavy, some sacrifices will have to be made.

Like 180 or so? Where I live, the major cost of owning stuff is storage, so something light and compact is worth a premium, which I am paying here in terms of reduced longevity compared to a better machine. I bought with the expectation that if it fell into disuse for any period of time, I would give it away rather than store it, and the expectation of a 12 month service life.

If I enjoyed selling things more, I probably would have gone for something more expensive anyhow, but I think the light weight is worth a lot in my situation.

>However, most of the time you are working on something that is New.

So I was just thinking about that today. I just bought one of those ridiculous 'incline' rowing machines; as you 'row' it lifts your body off the ground to provide resistance (in addition to the normal rowing motions) - I'd bet money this design lasts rather longer than the type of cheap rowing machine that uses gas pistons to provide the resistance.

There's all sorts of ordinary, everyday stuff that must be engineered to not come apart while using the absolute minimum of material (or the absolute cheapest and lightest of material; I imagine shipping was a significant portion of the cost to me)

I mean, that's the thing about engineering stuff. If you are willing to spend money on lots of high quality raw materials, even someone like me without much engineering background at all can design something that lasts just by massively over-speccing everything. The engineering skill comes in when you have to build a rowing machine that can stand up to vigorous use by a fifteen stone american, but they only give you a buck fifty worth of aluminum to work with.

I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that I look around my world and I see a bunch of stuff that must have taken a huge amount of engineering skill to make (I mean, to make at the price point that I got it at... to be functional in spite of the absolute minimum of raw materials) - would all that stuff be 'new' to an engineer?

I mean, I suppose this doesn't really have all that much to do with automated driving. But yes, I do support much greater liability for the people or entities that operate motor vehicles.

I think you should focus on civil penalties, not criminal. Criminal penalties for bad driving would not work in America, politically. Besides, higher insurance minimums help to make the cost of operating dangerous machinery around other people be born by the people who are choosing to operate that machinery. much greater insurance requirements and greater civil penalties will raise the cost of driving to include the cost of the injuries caused by driving

(right now, where I am, the insurance minimum is like a month or two of software engineer wages... so obviously, your insurance bill doesn't cover the likely cost if you actually injure or kill a person)

Of course, this would make driving a lot more expensive (well, it would shift the cost away from the people who are hit to the people who are choosing to drive these dangerous machines) and realistically would only work in urban areas where there is decent public transit. (Or maybe you could do something with geofencing insurance; you are a lot more likely to hit a person in an urban area, so maybe insurance in low-population areas would be cheaper, if you never drove in areas with a lot of other people?)

If anything, I think self-driving cars would make this slightly better, as the only sane way to insure them is for the company that created and maintained the self-driving system insure it, and that means there are deeper pockets behind the thing; deep enough to pay for the loss of a human life, or to repair a human.

sure, city by city and neighborhood by neighborhood... but my point is that you have a viable business, even if you only cover one city or even one neighborhood. Most of my traffic is to work and back.

Assuming that you have cheap/open source software (a big assumption) you could even setup federation. Like you and your crew setup a co-op in one area, and get a lot of riders through personal contacts. I and my friends setup a similar drivers co-op in a nearby area, and similarly use our contacts to build up a very local critical mass.

With federation, you could set it up so that if one of my drivers went to your area, say to drop off a customer, they could optionally be put on your network, either to work there, or maybe just to get customers on your network who wanted to go to my area.

I mean, you still have the huge problems of bad behavior, but I don't think uber/lyft have really addressed those problems very well, either. I think those problems are really hard, and maybe those problems would be easier to solve with a bunch of smaller but federated companies than with two large companies? Maybe not. I don't know.

I'm just saying, I think a lot of the critical mass issues could be pushed off to local leaders.

>Most people I know hate taxis. Uber can nearly raise prices to parity with cabs.

If they are willing to let their ridership fall to just above cab ridership numbers? sure.

That's the biggest problem with the market; demand is elastic. Uber's major competitor for my transportation dollars isn't lyft; it's me going out and buying a honda and driving myself. If they charged taxi prices, I'd buy a honda, and I'd use the rideshare less than 5% of the time I use it now.

Controlled environment? well-maintained roads? this doesn't sound like any city I've spent much time in.

I'm thinking like 101 seems reasonably straightforward, modulo the occasional construction, but once you get into san Francisco, there's a lot of dodging pedestrians, cyclists, skateboarders, shopping carts, stopped delivery vehicles, etc... It doesn't look nearly as controlled, to my eyes, as 101 does further out.

I'm... not sure you'd need a lot of network effects? I mean, you need a critical mass of drivers and riders, but they can be all in a small area and you can still provide a service. I mean, for the occasional user, sure, brand recognition matters; If I'm going from a strange airport to a hotel, I'm probably going to use the brand i know.

But usually? I switch from uber to lyft on my daily commute based on saving a few bucks almost every day. (right now, Lyft has some scheme where you can buy a 30-pack of $15 off coupons for $300. But they're used every time you ride lyft, so if you want to go somewhere for less than $15, you use Uber)

I mean, 90+% of my rides are areas I ride in a lot, where it would be worth my time to put a fair bit of effort into discovery.

I think that on the driver side, there's a lot of drivers with very strong locational preferences, too; If you are in SF and try to get a ride to San Jose, my experience is that 3 out of 4 uber drivers will kick you out of the car when they find out, so I think you might be able to recruit drivers that way, too.

mm. so I don't think driving in cities is easier - I mean, it's certainly harder for a human to drive in a city; I don't see any reason why it would be easier for a machine to drive in a city than in the country.

so, as long as investors have appetite to lose money to buy market share? you are, of course, right.

But the business cycle goes up, and the business cycle goes down. (I mean, the general trend is upwards, but if you don't think there will be big downturns inbetween, well...)

The problem is that yes, uber and lyft have dominance for as long as they are willing to run the business for less money than anyone else; This puts a pretty hard cap on how profitable they can be.

(I mean, for an example of a competitor who might be willing to do it for very little over break-even, I've talked with several people who would be interested in setting up a competitor that was operated as a driver's cooperative. I mean, even that isn't workable when uber and lift are losing money, but it would work at profit levels that uber and lyft would consider break-even; such a cooperative could work really well as a break-even business, while investors in both uber and lyft would be super disappointed with a break-even business)

Compounding this, the ridesharing space is one that is massively price sensitive. Uber and lyft are so cheap that I've gotten rid of my car, and I use them all the time.

But if they raise their rates significantly? I'm gonna go buy a honda and drive myself; They get to duke it out for driving me around when I'm drunk, but we're talking less than 5% of my rides.

I suspect I'm not super unusual in this regard.

True, but I think they are both symptoms of skimping on medical care, which I don't think people should have to do in general. (I would be happy to pay more taxes to make that happen.) I especially think people shouldn't ration medical care where I work; I suspect the median annual income here is closer to $200k than to $100k.

When you are sick, don't go to work. If there is any question of if the doctor can help, talk to the doctor. (Via phone or video chat, if necessary)

Yup, and that's about what you pay for a single person health insurance in the US that isn't very high deductible. I think my employer pays about $6K/yr for me and another $6K/yr for my partner, (I know this 'cause I've gotta pay taxes on hers, as we're not married) but it's a reasonably good plan. Same provider, but more expensive/better coverage when I was buying through my own company. When I see the doctor, they charge me a symbolic fee, but it's usually around what the ride share to get there costs me. (the parking there, ugh.)

Personally, I avoid the very high deductible plans, mostly because I have the option, but also because I don't want to deal with hospital billing. I've got an HMO (kaiser) and they charge me almost nothing at point of service, and I get to consume all the medical care my doctor thinks I need.

Unfortunately, my employer has a really juicy high deductible plan that a lot of my co-workers use. Like they actually give you money to put in your HSA that covers most of your high deductible. It's a good plan. But I don't like it because it means my co-workers get to keep extra money for not going to the doctor when they are sick, and instead they come into the open plan office and cough all over the place.

I mean, I do okay, and I'd be happy to kick in a little extra money if it meant my co-workers were more likely to go to the doctor when they are sick rather than sharing the love with the office.