mrobins

It’s not that anyone is describing his youth in an effort to render him blameless. They are reinforcing this image of him as aloof and practically just out of college in a way that softens public opinion and could lead to lighter sentencing and post-trial public treatment.

Even describing him as “mid-20s” when he was 27 when he started FTX is a deliberate and slightly misleading word choice that reporters use to buttress the version of the story they think will drive clicks. I don’t think reporters are trying to let him off but I think they’re taking the bait on the version of the story his team thinks lands the softest with the general public.

On top of that, the author’s contrast of his treatment to how actually young people of color are treated by the police, legal system and media is totally valid.

Here in NYC (and I’m sure elsewhere in the US) there was a movement to end tipping policies for all of the reasons noted here.

For a short time it succeeded for well known and established restaurants. Prominent restauranteur Danny Meyer signed all of his (mostly high-end) restaurants on. However while it worked at known entities that catered to very price insensitive customers and whose employment was considered a stepping stone, lesser known establishments couldn’t make it work. Employees left for jobs where they’d make more from big tippers and customers balked at higher service included prices.

The pandemic shattered pretty much all traction when even the most elite restaurants had an impossible time finding and retaining talent. In 2020 Meyer’s Union Square hospitality reversed their no tipping policy [0].

Long story short tipping is baking into US hospitality culture and very hard to change on a restaurant by restaurant basis.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/dining/danny-meyer-no-tip...

Agree in spirit but I think companies actually need to be extremely competent and consumer/privacy focused to ensure data collected NEVER leave their testing environment.

It takes constant vigilance and sadly the incentives aren’t there.

> What's wrong with a stable long-term business that makes founders and customers happy?

And employees.

Confirmed by AWS: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

Works from my computer but not my phone (AT&T in NY).

We're experiencing issues for some users but not all connecting to resources in US East 2.

I would generally agree but this position seems unique enough to warrant some latitude.

To quote the article:

> Bankman-Fried has decided to “confuse, evade, distort.”

Even if you believe he's smart enough to build a massive exchange that takes in billions of dollars of customer money but is too incompetent to institute the most basic safeguards that seems fraudulent (and criminally negligent) to me.

Also, all the "incompetence" seemed to benefit him and FTX senior leadership. Funny how things shake out like that sometimes...

Every time I start wondering if I’m too dogmatic about avoiding smart home products…

As a contrarian who doesn't love WFH this is spot on. A purpose-built place designed just for working where I can be hyper productive - yes please! Being able to focus while I work but collaborate/socialize/have lunch with colleagues is the ideal.

Living in a city where space is a premium, a functional home office takes up valuable space and is an eyesore. My wife and I both want big monitors but don't want our house to look like a coworking space. We don't necessarily want to be there every day when the kids come home from school.

My company gives a generous WFH stipend for equipment and furniture but its still essentially be donating part of my house to my employer. I'd much rather they foot the bill for the office.

This is entirely anecdotal but recently many top results in DDG read like they’re written by GPT-3 or the like. Half coherent sprawls of text that contain lots of random factoids but nothing novel or that actually answers the question.

Surely this is partially a calculated move to further reduce headcount/expenses.

Respectfully disagree. An obligation to maintain a service in perpetuity for no revenue becomes a huge unfunded liability.

What if the app falls out of favor and new marginal revenue can’t cover fixed costs?

What if the business wants to innovate in a way that dramatically changes its cost structure (maybe introduce a feature that requires a usage based license)? Sure you can gate older users but how long do you have to maintain a separate set of features for them?

Obviously it’s the apps responsibility to make a fair deal with users and stick to terms offered. Sure some companies can make a model that amortizes an upfront payment effectively over decades. In reality though, all that really matters to a company is new cash that pays expenses. If you’re not contributing to that at some point you are no longer the customer.

They have a web client that might be easily scraped.

Spotify’s user experience seems especially designed to de-emphasize choice. Over time their home pages have increasingly promoted playlists vs individual artists or albums. They’ve definitely worked hard to make the “playing like” algorithm that jumps in as soon as your selection very good. On one hand it’s great because it keeps decent music going but also a) blurs the line cognitively between your selection and something they picked and b) removes the prompt when an album is over to decide where to go next.

If you mean the infotainment system or head unit, I think lots of people place a very high value on usability. Depending on much you rely on navigation or use apps for audio, high quality UI goes a long way.

Fortunately if you also want to prioritize performance, mileage, etc., CarPlay makes it a lot easier to tolerate a lackluster factory interface.

I don’t know but I’m interested in trying Qobuz. They have supposedly personalized recommendations but I don’t know if they’re any good or algorithmic vs editorial. That said one of the main appeals is they’re just focused on music rather than all audio or being one part of a giant bundle.

Three things I love about cron: - hot keys/command palette for everything - great functions to view and schedule across my team - an app (yes, electron…) not a website

It also does lots of other nifty things like creating individual calendly-style links for a specific meeting.

Also the team is super responsive to feedback.

Sure donating to PACs can have positive impacts but it also fuels what has made politics so bad: a back and forth ever-growing battle for absurd campaign war chests.

I think lots of website owners know exactly where the value in their content exists. Whether or not they want to share that in a convenient way, especially to competitors etc is another story.

That said if scraping is inevitable, it’s immensely wasteful effort to both the scraper and the content owner that’s often avoidable.

I’m sympathetic to the complaints about “rude” scraping behavior but there’s an easy solution. Rather than make people consume boatloads of resources they don’t want (individual page views, images, scripts, etc.) just build good interoperability tools that give the people what they want. In the physical example above that would be a product catalog that’s easily replicated with a CSV product listing or an API.

I sympathize. I became stir crazy working at home 6-9 months into the pandemic. I like having an office as a separation between my work and home lives. I like being at a place designed for working where other people are working. I like the change of scenery.

Most surprising was I realized I actually get a lot out of having a commute. In the morning it’s time to think about what’s coming up for the day and in the evening it’s time by myself to unwind before walking in the front door.

When my company went fully remote and closed our office we gave people the option of getting a coworking space. I took advantage, I wasn’t sure I’d use it at first but figured it was worth a try. After a couple days I never looked back. Shortly after a friend who works remotely for a different company decided to share it with me and we got a bigger space. With the changes combined I noticed an immediate and marked improvement in my mental health.

For us, it’s great. We have a lot of the social benefits of being in an office even through we don’t work together. We also have strong relationships with our coworkers as our companies build remote-first cultures. To me it’s the best of both worlds and I’d have a hard time working all alone again.

Slightly off topic but Target is often neglected as a tech company. They’re arguably the best at omnichannel ecommcerce. Generally cheaper than Amazon with shipping almost as fast plus same day delivery and curbside pickup options. Their app has a super clean UI and “just works” to the point that it’s boring, but still with a ton of options and flexibility.

I think part of the larger challenge here is that the laws put the responsibility for enforcement on airlines. Flight attendants didn’t sign up and aren’t trained to be law enforcement officers.

More stringent, wider ranging consequences add teeth to FA authority and more importantly would prevent some people from challenging the rules in the first place.

One of the ironic things here is that it’s pitted Spotify’s brand as a music company against their brand as a podcast company. For people originally drawn to Spotify as a music service the departure of even a few icons all of a sudden makes Apple Music very attractive.

Spotify’s purchase of JRE turns them into his publisher/sponsor. When consumers and musicians cut ties they’re speaking with their $$ and saying they don’t want to support his content. That’s not the same as silencing or censoring him. There are countless open platforms he can speak his mind on.

He got paid $100M and his popularity is at least partly based on throwing red meat to stir up controversy. I think he’s thriving on attention from lots of people who would never otherwise think about him.

That’ll turn out like Kodak inventing the digital camera and shoving it in a drawer.

Keep in mind that the job of a journalist is distinct from the profession of running and programming a media outlet. In big newspapers journalists don’t even write the headlines that accompany the stories.

I’m also dismayed and disheartened by the quality of most journalism and press coverage we see today. That said I think journalists themselves are least to blame in the equation and have become victims of unsustainable business models.

Fortunately where I live public media thrives and has maintained journalistic integrity in the internet era.