testcase_delta

This is how it's supposed to work. That's the promise that sold me on using it for my business for a couple of years. It never delivered. Huge waste of time and money. Never again.

YouTube premium is great, I'm surprised it's not more popular. I'd cut my Spotify subscription way before YouTube, but that's not what I typically hear from my friends.

Spotify = Streaming music $12/month YouTube = Streaming music + learned SolidWorks + learned Blender + learning Spanish + general entertainment of all sorts... $12/month. YouTube is incredible.

Hi, sorry just saw this today. I'm self taught and invent things that I sell myself, so I'm not really sure about what getting into CAD for a larger business looks like.

So far I have focused on consumer goods for parents.

Invent or license things and sell them on Amazon. It's amazingly passive after the first production run. I just re-order and re-supply Amazon occasionally.

I learned CAD last year for work and my prototype turnaround times went from weeks to days to same day. Truly game changing for me. I can iterate an idea 5 times faster at least, not to mention hundreds of times cheaper (in some cases $800 part down to ~$5 part)

Even faster would be better, but print speed often isn't the bottleneck, solving engineering problems often is.

That said, of course faster would be better.

Any time I read threads like this one I am grateful I found Basecamp years ago. Granted, my company has a really small team (projects with 4 internal people on it), but largely due to how Basecamp is structured and my own dislike of being interrupted or time-sucking meetings, we suffer very little of the problems OP brings up. I strongly recommend Basecamp or at least checking out the philosophy behind the software.

Nice write-up. I second the endorsement of Loom. It's so much easier to record your screen and talk then to type out an email and take screenshots.

If learning is the goal, I highly recommend taking notes into a flash card system (I use and recommend Anki). Then review your flash cards daily.

You can always refer to the flash cards like regular notes, but by memorizing the information instead of just jotting it down you greatly increase the speed at which you learn new things.

I have dyslexia and find this simulation pretty accurate. Obviously it's just a simulation though. When I read, letters aren't literally jittering around the page, but I do have to do a lot of "double-takes": looking back at words and thinking hard to decode them.

As a kid, reading aloud in class was always nerve wracking because of this. The game was to do these double-takes so quickly that nobody could tell you were doing all of this extra work. Often you read ahead of what you're saying so that you can double-take before saying the word.

I have a really minimal/desirable gmail address and it's been only annoying. I constantly get emails from people by accident. I made my Hey address longer to avoid this.

Have you used Basecamp for any period of time? I'm excited about Hey because I think it will bring the organization and clarity to email that I have enjoyed in Basecamp for a long time.

Not at launch, but coming.

Basecamp (the project management software) has this as a built-in feature. My company is small enough that I always disable it. As we add more people and lean more into remote work I'll probably give it a try.

Garmine's recommendation is in line with expert opinions I've been reading for the last couple of days. There is at least one really great case study from the Spanish Flu: St Louis proactively closed schools and reduced deaths by 50%, compared to Pittsburg who closed schools relatively. It seems a decidedly good idea to get ahead of these things.

I really disagree with action trumping thought. When I started my business I took that approach too, but after initial success followed by 3 years of flat revenue growth I’ve realized that action is too easily pointless thrashing. It’s like someone who doesn’t know how to swim will drown while spending every ounce of their energy and someone who knows how to swim can easily float or move using just a small amount of their energy. There is only really one thing that grows my business at this point, so I just focus on that. After a few years of practice I’ve learned the basics (bookkeeping, mostly) so that is easy enough I don’t have to spend any more time then necessary.

To your first point, I'm not convinced that's true. People augment their lives in lots of ways that don't seem to reduce safety. A few examples off the top of my head: simple "dumb" cruise control hasn't lead to more accidents. Parachutes have auto-deploy features if the cord isn't pulled by a certain height. Scuba divers use dive computers that basically eliminate the need to learn dive tables (and beep at you when you're doing something dumb). Apparently passenger jets are highly automated (I'm out of my depth on that one). These are all on the spectrum towards automation and have only been helpful. Do you think the problem occurs as you approach 100%? Like an uncanny valley in the 99 to 99.99% range?

More than half of the items bought on Amazon and from a 3rd party seller but fulfilled by amazon. It arrives in an Amazon box in 2 days and most people don't realize it was from a 3rd party seller.

I would love a website that contrasted editorializing of the day's news and rated them. Is this something machine learning could accomplish? Sentiment analysis, perhaps?

David Simon (of The Wire) wrote a hilarious and edifying piece on the main contention in these negotiations.

He explains in it how agents systematically screw over writers: https://davidsimon.com/but-im-not-a-lawyer-im-an-agent/

I have stopped using Airbnb in part because of this issue. I also grew weary of the random and sometimes arduous “check-in” processes, which is different for every location as it is designed by the host. A recent one I did started like this: there is a key under the mat, that lets you in to the apartment garage, go in there and on your left there are key locks hooked on the fence, find the blue one and enter code... It’s just not a pleasant experience, especially after a long day of travel.

It's interesting seeing the tone in comment sections here change with time. Threads on Magic Leap used to have many defenders. Now, not so much.

Or when you run out of cash.

I started a company and brought on a best friend about 2.5 years in. It was a terrible and costly mistake. The business continues to thrive, but our growth was considerably stunted for the year he was on board.

I have a few theories for why it didn't work. I think it comes down to an expectation that, as a friend, normal work rules do not apply. This friend thought they could work on whatever was interesting (rather than what their job called for), and could flake or complain as a friend.

Perhaps a more domineering personality than myself could crack-the-whip and force a person into their role, but then what's the point of the person being a friend? And is that a good use of a founder's time and energy? Arguing with and controlling a friend/employee? Nope.

I have had much better luck hiring people I don't know and becoming their friend through work.