1,431 karma · joined October 7, 2020
The network effect is real and I don't think you can interface external email with it. You do get a Bloomberg email address as a user but I've never seen anyone in a chat with an external email only.
It could be if they were the only one trying to offer this, but because it's so expensive, there are always multiple competitors trying to pick off their users. And when the next round of corporate cost cutting comes, they always come for the Bloomberg terminals, trying to push something cheaper.
But the cheaper alternatives are always inferior too (never mind the decades of muscle memory on Bloomberg).
Despite the price Bloomberg has maintained its number one position. I think in no small part that's also because their customer support is absolutely excellent. Press F1 twice and you're in a chat with the helpdesk; these days the initial query is triaged by AI of course, but for actual issues you're talking to a real human in less than a minute (sometimes just seconds), and these real actual humans typically have the expertise to help you. If not, the higher levels of support are good too. Don't underestimate this aspect!
And every kind of price you can think of (almost). Crack spreads? River levels? Baseload power? Airline schedules? I am trying to think of more but it's truly VAST.
They have custom screens, configurable screens, custom settings (you want the generic futures contract to be rolled differently from the default? Sure...), option pricers and stuff I have never had to search for or look at.
They also have their own query language BQL for data queries and the BQNT platform is Python-based and optimized for use with the data.
If you just want the latest stock prices for your portfolio your online brokerage app probably does a better job.
The biggest miss right now is their ASKB AI chatbot, which is borderline moronic. It has to be some older model with low thinking/effort, because the first answer it gives is always broken in some way. Hallucinated functions or fields, outright wrong descriptions, etc. I don't even try to use the first answer anymore but ask it again to check its previous answer against verified and authoritative sources/documentation and will come up with many corrections. And then I do it again, and maybe a fourth time.
Apparently they're aiming to produce about 2500-3000 Luces (Luci?) a year, and they're building about 14,000 cars total annually. So not too many in keeping with their scarcity strategy. That has worked great for them so far, but I doubt they can replicate it with the Luce.
The way I'd phrase your last sentence would be: "It's NOT a Ferrari."
That's the whole problem. If you told me this is the latest Chinese luxury EV, I'd shrug my shoulders, say "hm, not bad" and "not for me," and move on.
For a Ferrari however it's horrendous.
For roughly 17% of the price.
And it looks the same.
What an abomination!
(You can probably find similar Chinese EVs that also outperform similarly.)
Could you also provide an exhaustive list of items that are NOT being backed up, e.g. the .git folder? I can't find any reference to that anywhere on your website or in the app. What else is not being backed up? I know about the exclusion list in the app, which I have adjusted to suit my requirements, but you need to be clear, explicit and upfront about what you are not backing up. This is critical information.
This article answers the question, "What does Backblaze back up?" Backblaze backs up all of your data across all of the user profiles that are on your computer as soon as you install the client.
Backblaze believes that you do not need to worry whether you selected all of the files that you care about, put any files in a different location on your computer, or added new files that may not be included in your online backup. Therefore, Backblaze automatically selects all of your data.
This is at best flat out wrong, at worst a blatant lie. But this was what I thought I was buying and paying for. Turns out you do have to worry!
Don't lie about other stuff you don't back up. Very disappointed in Backblaze.
The deal was that Backblaze backs things up and I don't have to worry about it. Learning that it does not back things up is a punch to the gut. I am familiar with the exclusions and I have a look at that list to make I'm not missing anything from my backups. I had always thought the exclusions list was exhaustive.
Excluding other files and folders without telling me about it breaks the deal. Dropbox is important to several of the users I installed it for. Ignoring .git folders is another one that affects me and I had not known about. Ouch.
I will now have to look for alternatives. It has to be easy to install, run seamlessly on non-technical users' machines and be reliable.
I find it hard to be think of a worse breach of trust for a backup service than not to back up files!
If anything, even the included quotes from Refine don't smell much of typical AI, but maybe I am less discerning there. I did notice the em-dashes though!
I don't think one is better than the other but my mind is currently wired to see indexing with base 1.
Then there's Option Base 1 in VBA if you don't like the default behavior. Perfect for creating subtle off-by-one bugs.
There was an annual fair in Düsseldorf, the Atari ST Messe, which was impressive in its size. I went for several years in a row until the ST sadly started losing its relevance.