_lex

shoot me an email and lets jump on a call. I'll blow your mind.

We've discovered the language. It changes the economics of computing.

As in, this entire cloud buildout is unnecessary because it becomes like using a calculator.

Reach out to chat.

You're witnessing a collapse of demand. Do not ignore it - though it may not be permanent.

The buildout is already taxpayer funded: see the big beautiful bill, which seems like it was engineered to make this effectively free.

They can blend leverage, 100% 1st year depreciation with using the hardware itself as a financing asset and dozens more financial engineering steps -

Their actual cost of financing is probably incredibly low already.

I worry that they are thinking of trying to run the company just ahead of debt/lease payments or something, otherwise this is just a distraction

So they want even more?

Incorrect. The search algo has a goal: to find out. You just think it has no goal because you didnt think in quantum.

I've been working on a project called x174 to deal with this disaster. Think of it as a bugfix. Will reach out

Btw - this sort of project is what my startup does - we spin out autonomous projects - that could be companies - that provide social good and solve otherwise unsolvable problems.

You're talking ahead of the others in this thread, who do not understand how you got to what you're saying. I've been doing research in this area. You are not only correct, but the implications are staggering, and go further than what you have mentioned above. This is no cult, it is the reorganization of the economics of work.

Leaders build systems that build tools.

They sometimes build the tools themselves if communication /finding help would take more effort and time than diy.

Any other deployment indicates waste (e.g. ego / needing to show off your awesomeness, or needing to upskill yourself because you aren't the right skill-shape for the job) or a company starved for capital that is sacrificing the long term for the short in order to survive.

Hey, I want to get in contact with you - you're thinking the way I like folks in my company to think, and I want to hire you or do a deal with you.

Check my profile and reach out.

this site tried to download a potentially dangerous file to my machine on navigation to the link - flagging.

I also might be interested - definitely reach out to me (my email is in my profile).

Replacing my time capsule is not a priority for me, because it's a backup. If the backup goes bad / fails, I'm not sure why I should care (unless it fails silently)... By definition, I have a duplicate copy so all I need to do is to replace it when it fails, with whatever the latest greatest solution is. I do recognize that there's a bit of risk during that replacement period, but I'm not losing sleep over a few days of exposure. And I'm not worried with it failing silently because my machine is constantly writing to it and it's constantly moving and compacting (aka reading) data to eliminate the oldest stuff anyways.

My only actual concern is whether or not the networking aspect of my time capsule is up to snuff... Perhaps it makes sense to get a better wireless router, and perhaps there have been advances in router tech that mean I could get way better performance on my network. But there's no easy way for me to know if that's actually the case, so I'm just holding on to my time capsule until some event triggers me to make a change.

I use SKEDit to achieve this functionality today on my android phone. It works with phone calls, sms, whatsapp and emails. It's really cool when it activates - it literally will pull downthe search bar, type in 'whatsapp' to select the app, launch the app, search for the contact I told it to message, tap on them to message them, and type in the message I had automated - and you can just watch and follow along as it does all this. V awesome if you have social anxiety, a poor memory, a busy schedule, or all of the above.

Possible moats:

1. the cost of having and maintaining a fleet of scooters 2. the network of flexible staff charging scooters 3. proprietary battery packs 4. the network of flexible staff moving the scooters to better locations 5. exclusive access to a scooter with a performance profile that the rest of the market cannot match (think tesla). x. contractual moat

1) will not stop startups with access to funding from entering the market. Providing service will require a fleet of these lite EVs and as the economics becomes obvious, the companies will merge (so they share overhead costs) until there are only one or two fleets.

2) Is very short term, because eventually the companies will figure out that they can get their users to charge the scooters themselves - by literally bringing their own battery pack (it's pretty portable - see https://electricscooterparts.com/batteries.html) to the scooter and plugging their battery in. The scooters will validate the powersource to ensure it's safe and that will be the end of the "paying random people to charge scooters" business.

3) They can't even charge for proprietary battery packs and use that sunk cost as a moat, because with VC money, competitors will just give away their own proprietary battery packs. Maybe the switching cost will be the time it takes to receive your free battery pack in the mail, but you'd just order a free one from each competitor in your area, so this is an insignificant moat.

4) Is also relatively short term: They will also eventually tell users where they are allowed to leave the scooters, and charge people who don't comply. They may frame it as a discount, but.... In the end the hard work will be outsourced to customers, which means there will really not be lock in. Any leftover work will eventually be done by professionals, or maybe by a smaller network of people moving scooters, if they are cheaper.

5) This is the best moat, but it's similar to the moat iphone used to have. They will need patents and to basically be on the forefront of the industry, forever. Boosted Boards is likely to wind up occupying this position, though they are likely to not directly operate their scooter rental product, but instead sell the scooters in an exclusive agreement to a particular company that turns around and wins the market with lower costs and higher reliability. Boosted would use their monopoly position to extract as much profit from that partner as is possible while allowing the partner to still be cheaper than getting and maintaining other scooters. Eventually their partner will try to clone their product and get it cheaper elsewhere, unless Boosted's patent game is very strong.

x) I think there's another possible moat. A particular service provider may be able to force users to agree that they only use their own boards in order to have access to lower marginal cost. Users may get a discount for not having the competitor's app on their phone. Alternatively, a provider might allow users to buy like $500 credit up front for a significant discount to achieve similar impact.

good lord. I didnt even check that one.

This approach may make sense if you're either uniquely qualified or willing to speak to a lot of companies.

You are basically signaling what type of person you are, divulging critical information to the hiring manager when you do this.

Specifically, you are saying that you will not put up with BS. The problem is, work is generally at least 60% BS, and as a hiring manager, you want someone who will put up with the shit to get to the glory. And you really want someone who believes there is glory to be had - that person will outwork anyone else.

So you've signaled that you will not outwork others and that you will not put up with BS - you're interviewing and have already exposed yourself as a flight risk willing to do less than a theoretical other person would.

So yeah, they will pass on you in droves unless you have some unique aspect to your profile that makes you uniquely qualified.

Did you write the book on what the company is trying to do? If yes, more power to you - people put up with Steve Jobs to get access to his potential. Maybe you're worth it.

If not, you'll have to find someone who appreciates you and your values. And forget company value statements - that shit means nothing in the day-to-day. What you're basically looking for is a hiring manager with strong values aligned to yours, who also has the power to do the hire. And you'll find him if you look hard enough.

"In order to get a good understanding of the purchasing power of your future retirement savings for today, you can do a “simple” calculation: Take your total retirement savings and multiply it by 3%. For example, if you have $1.25m (retirement savings), multiplied by 0.03% (inflation), you get $45,000 in inflation. Then you subtract that number from your total savings: $1.25m - $45k = $880k. This will give you a baseline to understand your financial situation."

Yeah, so $1.25m - $45K is NOT 880K.

Also, the effect of inflation compounds every year. So maybe you want to divide the nominal answers you are giving out by (1.03)^num-years-from-today to get the real value (in today's dollars) .

Please do better math.

The problem is that facebook changed their business model (so you have to pay for people to see your content - he calls it payola), and a lot of content providers did not change their business models away from expecting free publicity from facebook. Really, all funny or die needed to do is to switch to a mailing list-type setup, where they actually can reach their customers without paying auction prices for every message. They should basically have given up on facebook as a means of reaching new customers, except for signing people up to their mailing list-type setup, and then trimmed operations to work at whatever scale that business could support, with the knowledge that they could grow that operation on a monthly basis to eclipse their facebook viewership.

More content providers need to recognize that facebook sees their relationship as being zero sum, and that facebook controls all the cards in their own game, so it doesnt matter how many impressions/views you can get from facebook - they are the ones who benefit. You get to pay content generation costs.

Honestly, just make it into a bullet point list: your reformulation of the ideas is WAY clearer and requires no additional explanations. Maybe add graphical examples if you must, but referring back to the text of the original site actually makes yours worse.

I think the POV he's taken is that the kafka stream is the one true datasource (for all time), with all other dbs being derivatives. This insane strategy seems to be over engineered to get around db migrations... though i'm sure the event stream will also change over time, and he'll have to write migration-like code anyways.

"I'm using my voice as my password".

Vanguard allows voice authentication (https://investor.vanguard.com/account-conveniences/voice-ver...) - and who knows who else will roll something similar out in the future. Yeah, its really really dumb, but it's happening in production now. I wouldn't use this product if I were you, but honestly you should also not use voice verification/authentication for anything.

Seriously - what types of treatment actually work for people addicted to drugs?

As far as I know, none of them work ( where working is defined as >50% of people who complete the treatment course being able to move on to lead a normal, drug free life). A lot of them do make a ton of noise though, and several basically lower your expectations from the outset (like AA) - so you treat addiction as a chronic disease: something you'll never be cured of, and have to always deal with.

The parent poster seemed to be arguing that iboga can cure addiction. If he's right, this is a big deal.

This article makes a ton of sense for people in smaller companies that aren't worried about rapidly shifting markets and the long time-to-delivery of new functionality that is made possible by technology. He's effectively arguing "why build android when j2me already exists". The problem is that when the iphone comes out, you want something you can quickly retool into a competitive product - otherwise you might get killed by the movement of the market itself. See blackberry & windows mobile for what happens when you're too late to the game.

Now, you could argue that it makes more sense to try to make the iPhone instead of a me-too system like android originally was. But most companies aren't apple of 2005, and they know it. They know they aren't really leading in anything - they just don't want to be left in the dust. So they ask their tech teams to investigate stuff that might be transformational, like the blockchain, because if it did create a new green field, they want to have access to the new market and at least near-first mover advantage.

This is the principal agent problem in private, illiquid companies.

There are issues with founders, employees and VCs, where each invest in "the company" with an expectation of different payoff schedules, and each is not at all looking out for the best interests of the others.

So this is really a fight for the high ground - who gets to set payoff schedules: the founder, or the VC? Who gets to set strategic direction? And who's just along for the ride? [Note that the employee is not really in the running here, and that since they aren't allowed to set any rules, they should be as ruthless in extracting value (pay, career development & benefits) from companies as VCs and founders would be in extracting & securing their payoffs.]

In the end, these people aren't your friends, and any friendliness is simply another form of currency, which they can chose to invalidate at any time. Like Benchmark Bucks.

One thing I should mention is that on teams where you deliver a lot of product quickly, it can be much easier to develop and maintain both skillsets.

In the end it's not about time, but what you've seen and done.

You don't need anyone else's signoff to consider yourself for any role. By default, you're the most powerful person in your life, but when you allow other people to tell you what you are, you wind up giving away some of your power. This is particularly true in interviews, where another person who doesn't know you is judging you based on a sliver of who you really are. Your job is to define what you want, then show the sliver that aligns with what the world expects from you.

Especially on teams where you deliver a lot of product quickly, it can be easy to develop and maintain both skillsets.

You hear about it in the web developer context (and especially not in finance) because they tend to have quicker iterative cycles, and therefore may be doing quite a bit more coding. There may also be a cost, corporate maturity and scale component as well. ( At scale, you want to depend on fewer exceptional people, and many more average people, doing average things. Fullstack is still seen as exceptional, and its hard to scale exceptional).

"most “full stack” developers have not truly mastered front end and back end"

We need to do something about the default of developer bashing prevalent in our culture. There's no true Scotsman, nobody is 100% perfectly attuned to the latest developments on any surface.

Instead engineers develop along competencies that are required in their work. If you need to deep dive into a backend problem, you'll get better at that problem space. Same with frontend.

Yes there are separate stacks beneath the problem being solved, and yes there's discovery and learning as people spend years in a certain focus - but does focusing only on 1 thing mean that you've attained competency in that 1 thing? Does focusing on both the frontend and backend mean that you can't have attained competency in both?

I personally work with fullstack engineers that are better at frontend than some frontend engineers, AND better at backend than some backend engineers - so the answer here is clear to me.

Congrats on finding a real problem and building something to solve it. You're about to fight an uphill battle.

Here's my feedback (from someone who currently leads the leads of 7 remote engineering teams):

• Not knowing if someone is available and if they will get back to you soon is very very bad for many conversations. For example, when you have a C-level asking for rapid turn around on something that needs to be done by someone multiple levels away from you.

• In remote teams, sometimes people disappear (e.g. car accident or civil unrest in a random country), and if you have no way to know, you'll eventually get fed up.

• The feeling of cohesiveness that comes from having realtime conversations, brainstorms and other collaboration is very important to managers (especially in remote teams) and convincing them that realtime talk is not a good default is going to be quite hard.

• As a result you will never be their default communication channel - at most you'll be the place they discuss bigger problems. But because you're not the default, you'll get destroyed by slack, who is the default. Most times people use the tool at hand that they are most familiar with, not the best tool for the job. I would encourage you to write a slack bot that reminds people to use you & helps them easily experience value from your product without you having to win the default spot.

• Finally, most people will have serious difficulty seeing the difference between your product and other product management tools that allow commenting in detail on issues being discussed.

it's possible that she's the only woman on the panel because she thinks this way

Note I said "it's possible". I did that because I can't prove it. I don't think anybody can prove either possibility.

why do you assume anything is racist in the first place instead of thinking it is just normal human behaviour?

I'm not originally from the US, though I live here now. While you may look at me and see a black man, I grew up in a country where everyone was black, and therefore nobody was. As a result, I'm probably the least indoctrinated into any movement or society based on identity. The idea that I might identify with racial issues faced by American blacks was one that was forced onto me by reality.

Imagine you're a black person who's never seen racism before. You'd only start assuming that the problems you face are related to race when you are repeatedly treated worse than your cohort, and when you're treated so badly that there is no plausible narrative that you can construct that will lead to another explanation. For example: Employers are shocked (and uncomfortable) when a black face shows up with your resume. Your job offers are lower and less frequent, although you're at the top of your field. People find issues with you and your work that they just can't explain, but accept and praise your work when submitted under other names. Senior leaders think you're a janitor when you lead a department. Patients refuse to be seen by you, even though you are indisputably the best in your speciality. I can go on (note these events have not all happened to me, but each has happened to someone in my inner circle). After a while, even someone who didn't know that racism existed would discover it. You're lucky you don't have to.

Movements like feminism and BLM must sometimes be wrong about specific events - there's no way to really prove what's in someone's heart. And sometimes bad things happen to women and black people - things that would have happened independent of gender and race. But when there's a distinct, recurring pattern, it's really hard to pretend like nothing's wrong.

Separately, you should know that racism and sexism are actually normal (meaning default) human behavior. People form groups based on similarities and exclude those who are dissimilar. These groups may include employment, or leadership at companies. Thats why this is so hard.