theprop

$1.7 billion? That's all? I usually spend around 75 cents a month (migrated off AWS due to it being way too expensive). They emailed me with an estimated bill of $264 billion.

This is interesting and may point to X / Twitter becoming more AI-driven in the future (many possibilities). Grok has become my go-to AI -- I personally find it better than (the free version at least) of ChatGPT, paid Gemini, and anything else -- though it does have a lot of problems.

You're doing excellent. Don't worry about anything. Here are my quick thoughts which are in a kind of Maslow-ian Hierarchy of Needs. You're already on them by getting your mental health in order, nice work.

Immediate Steps:

1. Work. Keep driving full-time or more until you pay off the tires, insurance, car payment and amass some savings. Working a lot will keep your mind focused and bring in income while you start to get other things in life in order and apply for other jobs.

2. Living. There are probably great & beautiful campsites in Utah. Probably avoid hotels as much as you can in order to save money. Sleep in your car or better in a tent at a campsite or in a state or national park (backpack out a bit, pitch your tent and sleep). To take showers and exercise, join Planet Fitness or something similar for $10 / month. If you're not familiar with backpacking, it's easy to pitch a tent. Try sierra.com to find a cheap tent and supplies.

Other Living idea: check out couchsurfing.com. Folks will house you for free.

3. Food. If you camp, you can use a small propane powered stove to cook inexpensive meals e.g. rice, beans, pasta, etc. Eat a lot of nuts, inexpensive fruits & vegetables.

4. Get a Laptop. A laptop will be critical to getting a resume ready & sending it out. Check out Free Stuff in Craigslist, NextDoor, or Facebook Marketplace. Check out real cheap laptops (for less than $100) in Craigslist, NextDoor, or Facebook Marketplace.

5. Internet / WiFi / Unlimited Mobile Data. I recommend visible.com for like $25/month. There are tons of places with free WiFi like libraries which you can use as well.

6. Upskilling / Up-job-ing. To get a new job or learn or other things, you'll need a laptop and an internet connection so first get that. If you already have ready programming skills, then you need get your resume together and start applying and or reach out to your network. Make sure you're in a stable position to work both mentally and otherwise before you start this process. You will get tons of job rejections and it will be disheartening because you're working very hard, so be prepared and don't worry, something will eventually work out.

7. Roommate / Living / Health Insurance --> once you have some savings (a few thousand) and a reasonable stream of income at least from driving, you could look for a roommate situation. If you don't have or lost your health insurance, you probably qualify for an affordable health care act plan (off-schedule) and can get that -- list income very low and you won't have to pay much. You could try Medicaid, but I think the affordable care marketplace is probably simpler and you plan anyway to have income soon.

8. Networking. I highly recommend networking with other professionals in your field in your area. One good way to meet them is to join relevant meetups and check for other events. Some meetups on specialized things like ML or online privacy, etc. can have really excellent and relevant attendees you can network with. These are all generally free.

9. AI/ML work. If you already code, you can start tinkering with the AI platforms and such to get some experience. I'd look for a job with your current skills and simultaneously keep learning -- after you get a bit stable via the current driving job.

Those are my thoughts. Feel free to message me if you have any questions or need any resume editing help (ChatGPT is probably a more effective editor than me :-). I'm not in your area, but hopefully other folk in your area are messaging you already with some potential job opportunities. Focus on small steps, small wins. Good luck, you are and will make it.

This is a good thought too :-). Decisions...decisions...

I'd look for a partner. It's very hard to be a solo founder and it sounds like you're not sure of an idea/market, etc. I'd also start keeping a list of problems you face/solutions i.e. ideas for a possible product to build. It's very, very hard to build a business. If you're not sure, don't have a partner or idea, I wouldn't recommend you get into it just yet. I'd recommend you look for a company you're really interested in and get to know a market, how their business runs, etc. You may meet other potential partners there (co-workers) and you'll get to know a business niche, etc. So I'd recommend 1. for now. Also, differentiate when you start between a business and a project: a business really has revenues/a model to grow quickly while a project is something you build more for fun that may or not generate revenues or go somewhere. Projects can become the biggest businesses (google, facebook were started as projects), but you don't necessarily want to bet your savings on that initially. Just some random thoughts...hope they're helpful, good luck and congrats on the previous 11 years of dedicated, rewarding work it sounds like, nice!!!!!

The McDonnell Douglas leadership seems to have put business ahead of engineering (and safety) at Boeing (from other pieces I've read). There are at present just two manufacturers of big planes in the world (China may have a third soon I believe) so it would be terrible for airline safety/efficiency if Boeing did go bankrupt (which is still unlikely) and left just one company with no competition. I think what we should all hope for is a return to Boeing's engineering-centered roots. There are tens of thousands of people who work hard at Boeing, do incredibly difficult work and take justifiable pride in the amazing planes they build. It's a shame that some bad leadership has led to these tragically avoidable crashes. As disturbing and infuriating as these messages are, I believe Boeing if it is once again engineer-lead can get back to strong form and that's what we should all hope for.

We don't know if IPSec or L2TP is compromised...could be either or both. So why is using Ikev2 with IPSec secure??

Sorry yes China's the biggest by that data, but India has more fatalities per mile driven than China and at about 10x the rate of the U.S. which itself isn't doing that great.

What a complete idiot in soooo many ways...now you can understand the situation of India's development when such utter morons are "leaders" of India! India actually needs driverless cars more desperately than any country in the world given it's world-leading 200,000 fatalities every year.

What 3D printer or service -- in any material, metal, wood, plastic, glass, anything -- can print something affordably i.e. $5 for something that's say 1" by 5" by 5" ???

I got a 212 number for no extra cost from MagicJack.

What were the gradually escalating intimate questions asked?

Redfin is a big pile of nothing. It's a glorified real estate agency which is itself an anachronism or soon will be.

You can easily find online or other brokers ready to "sell" your house which just means listing it on the realtors' association multiple site listings for 1% or even a few hundred dollars. The realtors association still control everything in terms of having all the data on homes for sale.

They could have some opportunity in giving buyers rebates i.e. having a 1-2% margin for buyers which most agents don't give, mostly because it's a lot luck to find a buyer than to represent the sell-side.

The idea that it's worth around 8x revenues...a low margin business as a real estate agency is...is a stretch, though to be fair, their revenues are fast-growing without that much of a marketing spend.

Not sure how their quarterly sales vary (seems like a lot in their profitability at least) but their latest quarter was terrible with only $6 mn in gross income on nearly $60 million in revenues and then $30 mn in operating expenses.

They claim to have helped users buy/sell $40 billion in real estate last year but showed just $270 mn in revenues which is something like .8% of that market value (while it should be in the 1.5 to 2.5% range I think). Not sure why that it is.

Wow, amazing persistence. 20 years between first proof of concept to release of a xerox machine as we know today. 10 years later he's dead.

"There's lies, there's damned lies, and then there's statistics..." Mark Twain

This is HUGE. What's much more interesting is not getting this into grocery stories but into homes. Delivery costs and spoilage represent something like 40% or so of produce costs, maybe more. So in theory it would be much more efficient if you could grow your own vegetables and fruits at home. Right now, only a few things like basil can be grown this way, but probably in time, we can via "breeding" have many other fruits and vegetables that can be grown on a smaller scale in the home.

I personally like this because of trust...I don't want pesticides in my food and I don't trust organic farmers markets who probably just bought their produce at a local grocery store then mark it up double for me ;-D. So I'd much rather grow myself if it was easy enough to do.

It was helpful for me as I check only my comments often, not the whole thread so I would've missed it otherwise.

The summaries are not good. They will point something out like "five key points are made" without stating those five points...which would presumably have been clearly stated in the article. Did you try other APIs/services/software?

Awesome work!! Great story about how awful the legal system is given the amount of effort and work you had to go through. You deserved a lot more than just that $4k.

I personally feel bad that it's only after reading this that I'm going to stop using Uber as well...despite all of the terrible stuff that's going on over there, I was willing to strike up to "growing pains" or "bad apples", since I wrongly believed they were 100% committed to their users. That's clearly not the case so there's no more Uber for me.

Xmarks is a great app to save them.

I also have thousands of bookmarks I rarely look into or use. BUT when I do go through them, I'm happy and find interesting stuff I'm glad I did go back through...so I'd say save away the great stuff, just like you save great photos.

Launch many satellites into space which have huge reflective screens to bounce away some 1% of the light that would otherwise reach Earth.

I heard this idea suggested at least a decade ago in Popular Science. I imagine there are many such proposals to defeat global warming (beyond cutting CO2 emissions), but somehow this one stuck with me. Musk could also do it with his rockets.

Yes, it is melting and some of the before/after photographs are the most devastating evidence.

There are some famous photos of Patagonia 100 years ago and today...anyone remember them?

I managed to find these before/after photos of glaciers in Alaska.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2972130/Globa...

Yeah, well that's kind of true...so you could say I'm still on reddit ;-)...

It's very hard to make m&a work at high valuations. Very few companies have done m&a well -- maybe just facebook & google & apple to a lesser extent.

It's very hard to make e-commerce work. E-commerce is checkered with failure.

Not sure why they'd acquire a hybrid high-end retailer along with a bunch of other strange e-commerce firms. They seem to be focused on apparel -- may be some plan for apparel?!

Last I heard Reddit was doing less than $10 mn / year in revenues. It's highly under-monetized, but it looks difficult to grow in 5 to 10 years to generating $150 million in annual profits to justify this valuation.

I'm surprised Reddit stays so popular. I stopped using it ~8 years ago. The habit didn't stick with me (beyond a year or two).

Can it self-drive in snow and rain?

This is going to be a disaster. They are anti-Walmart. Walmart needs to stay true to its vision of low price, high quality. Bonobos is high price, high end. "But for now, there are no plans to offer Bonobos’s $98 chinos or $128 dress shirts in Walmart’s 5,000-plus stores. Instead, Walmart is hoping to learn from Bonobos." Anytime you spend $310 million "hoping to learn"...you have no idea what your plan is and that means you fail when you're in e-commerce and aren't focused.

So great to read personal stories about many of the insanely hard-working & talented engineers who made the iphone and ipod. Their stories sadly are often lost or left out.

Yeah but it's good that Jobs who has a kind of god-like status these days could be a complete f*ing idiot (which would be his own words) by being against things like the iPod for Windows.

Laugh! Cry! Celebrate! Don't worry!

Don't worry at all...you're a HUGE success in terms of having something you built get acquired and still be alive and having created two things that even went anywhere! Keep expenses low & not to worry!

If not doing something is driving you nuts, start doing something...could be quite menial work, but something to get your mind focused on anything...and then thinking a bit about the next project / chapter. Could be learning something new, sports, another new skill, anything...

In terms of another company/project, I think it's important to find a great partner/partners or at least folks to brainstorm on.