code4tee

Every person I personally know on this list made it their life mission to be on the list. It was lost on them that the whole thing has become a running joke that everyone else thinks is just full of grifters.

Another “30 under 30” grifter goes to jail.

Separately, I hope a few folks at JPMC got fired over this. Even the most basic of due diligence should have caught this.

I see the string of “30 Under 30” being a statistically valid predictor of future likelihood to go to prison continues. These lists feed on the narcissistic tendencies of grifters who are desperate to get on the list and then tell you about it on LinkedIn.

These lists have such a bad reputation these days that legit top folks are asking their PR people to keep the off!

Impressive round but it seems unlikely this game can go on much longer before something implodes. Given the amount of cash you need to set of fire to stay relevant it’s becoming nearly impossible for all but a few players to stay competitive, but those players have yet to demonstrate a viable business model.

With all these models converging, the big players aren’t demonstrating a real technical innovation moat. Everyone knows how to build these models now, it just takes a ton of cash to do it.

This whole thing is turning into an expensive race to the bottom. Cool tech, but bad business. A lot of VC folks gonna lose their shirt in this space.

Who is “Swami?” Although I suppose that’s just making the point that Amazon’s folks aren’t recognized leaders in this space.

This is a pointless feature that’s easily bypassed if you know what you’re doing. It’s there so someone can check a compliance box to make an auditor that doesn’t know much about tech feel better. That’s it.

And yet ironically, in the US at least, there’s a decent chance that plumber actually makes more than a physician.

That’s the doomsday scenario and thankfully “completely useless” is quite unlikely. However all viruses mutate and so it’s only a matter of time before the current vaccines become gradually less effective. We give people 3-4 new vaccines a year (usually in one “flu shot”) in the never ending battle against the mutating influenza virus. So it’s really important we get as many people vaccinated ASAP. Every new person infected makes millions upon millions of copies of the virus, each one being a new opportunity for mutations to develop. Stopping infections exponentially slows down the rate at which the virus can mutate simply because it’s being “photocopied” fewer and fewer times.

It’s based on a sample and extrapolated out so it’s entirely possible initial immunity was overestimated. Possibility for bias in the sampling of who was tested and such. Hopefully it’s just a statistical fluke but everyone is sort of on edge at this point watching for this starting to happen.

It’s not really a question of if the virus will mutate to reinfect people again (or infect those vaccinated) but more of when and if we can get to herd immunity before that happens.

Summary: This is concerning because it may mean that people who were previously immune (had COVID) are no longer immune or a new strain is infecting people even though they had immunity to the original strain. Either of which, if true, would be bad.

Data is preliminary but based on previous metrics on exposure and “immunity” we shouldn’t see so many people getting sick. Also possible this is another “super contagious” strain and it is ripping its way across the remaining population that’s not immune. Also possible they just overestimated the number of people that should be immune (obviously this would be the ideal answer).

Everyone is sort of holding their breath that the vaccines will maintain immunity until “herd immunity” can be established. If the virus mutates so existing immunity no longer protects you then we’re sort of back to square one and this will be like fighting the flu where it never “goes away.”

This comes up every time Assange comes up. He’s not being prosecuted for being a journalist. The US has very strong protections for journalism that stand up to just about anywhere—-and honestly look great compared to things that have happened in the UK. Assange is charged with actively working to steal classified information.

There’s a huge difference between A) someone gets classified information through nefarious means and shares that with a journalist, and B) “journalist” actively works to steal said classified documents. This case is about “B” not “A” but yet we keep seeing people trying to make the argument that this is some sort of attack on journalism. That’s a gross misrepresentation of the basic facts in this case.

Very little in this post is true and highlights the sort of false image people paint of the US:

- Most people work multiple jobs to make ends meet: False

- Low income people don’t have health coverage: False

- The US doesn’t have any form of government safety net health coverage for its people: False. Medicaid covers low income population and Medicare covers the older population.

Not saying any of the above is perfect but these false pictures people paint of the US deserve to be called out.

A long time ago the best talent from PhD programs tended to stay in academia. That was considered the “prize.” Over the last 15 years or so the tables have really turned. Not saying top people don’t stay, but I now see much if not most of the top talent continuing their careers in the private sector or elsewhere. We’re in an era where the most cutting edge and impactful research increasingly does not take place at academic institutions. Between that and the vastly different compensation structures in the private sector it’s not too surprising top people want to go elsewhere.

As someone mentioned to me recently “Success in academia is defined by publishing papers mostly read only by a few other people that define success as publishing papers. Success outside academia is defined by doing amazing $&@! that has a measurable impact on the world.”

LinkedIn seems to be populated mostly with people looking to impress other people on LinkedIn. Problem is the only people truly active are those trying to impress others and the people all these folks are trying to impress aren’t there (apart from logging in once a year to update their current position or profile.)

The fact that static old school servers in the cloud are more expensive than hosting it yourself is news to precisely nobody. That’s not the business case for the cloud. In 2020 if your tech stack is still a monolith of giant servers on a rack somewhere you’ve got far bigger problems in your future.

This is great. For many high velocity low runtime workloads this is going to be a result in a significant cost savings.

The numbers you describe are an opportunity but also a big risk. The problem with these app-based businesses is that there’s little brand loyalty. They spend a ton of money to create a market and customer base and round about the time they start making money a copycat comes along and customers flip. It becomes a race to the bottom. Few would dispute the profit that could come from holding onto a user for years. Many will dispute the likelihood that this will actually happen.

1) The assets are not liquid.

2) Because the assets are not liquid the “value” of the assets is highly debatable. (Value of your stock portfolio vs private equity holdings).

3) Some assets are not free to own. Simple example being property. It’s worth a lot but also costs a lot (taxes, Maint, ...) to own it. This is in theory valued into the asset value but really on a point in time basis. If the asset isn’t “productive” in earning income then having it on your books with those expenses just keeps eating away at funds elsewhere. Think owning a paid off rental property that doesn’t earn enough to cover its annual costs. Worth a lot in a fire sale, but terrible item to have on the books long term.

4) Companies can have negative goodwill on their balance sheet, especially if there are questions about the quality of the fundamental business or management team. Outsiders may say the company owns a lot of stuff but it’s so poorly managed that that that stuff isn’t worth what it’s normally worth. Yahoo had this issue where the market cap of the company was less than the stock Yahoo owned in other companies. “Yahoo the company” and its team was literally considered to be worth negative dollars.

I again suggest looking at other retail models. Grocery stores, department stores and such operate a sizable part of their business by simply providing distribution and shelf space for goods. They don’t own all the inventory on their shelf. For things like beverages and certain other goods they literally just rent shelf space in the store (3rd parties come in and stock the shelf) and then put their own store brand stuff right next to it selling for less. It’s literally the same model. One really struggles to make the argument that it’s bad to do this online but not in person. That’s the issue with this line of reasoning.

Is a traditional store also not a marketplace for product manufacturers and distributors to sell their wares? It operates the same way. Drop off a truckload of your stuff at mega-mart’s distribution hub and they take care of the rest via their marketplace for your canned beans or whatever you’re trying to sell. If your product is popular, mega-mart will probably make mega-mart beans and put them right next to yours on the shelf at a lower price. The fact that it happens on a website vs a physical store doesn’t change anything.

By this logic though shouldn’t “store brands” at the grocery store or “CVS brand” medicine at the drug store also be “illegal.” Both those surely look at which brands are selling before deciding to make a generic to put on the same shelf at a lower price. That’s not a monopoly, that’s standard practice in the retail business.

Thus the presence of competing products or the fact that generics appear against popular options is really not a good argument for nefarious activity.

The issue from some of those crying foul is really that there isn’t any brand loyalty towards what are commodity items. Why should someone buy your more expensive HDMI cable when a perfectly good one sells for less? It’s a valid question those crying foul need to answer. The answer here of course is that many/most of those doing the selling are middle-men and not actual product manufacturers thus it’s very easy to undercut the person that doesn’t really need to be part of the supply chain.

Agree, but I’d consider the photo quality printing to be more of an edge case for most users. If one just occasionally prints a few photos there are other inexpensive services available. But if that is the use case then yes I’d agree inkjet is better.

Inkjets are just not great printers, especially if you print infrequently. Laser printers used to be an expensive luxury but they’ve long since become a commodity. Get a half decent laser printer and it will work fine even if you only print once a month.

If you’ve ever been in a company with a toxic leader you can relate. It will literally destroy everything in the company. The toxic leader usually thinks everyone else is the problem, causing them to double down. It’s a vicious cycle that’s destroyed many companies.

This doesn’t make sense. Domain registration is different than DNS. Many would argue keeping your domain registration separate is probably a good thing. Sounds like your problem was with the registrar (making it hard to update NS records to Route53 or anyone else) not AWS.

You live in the middle of nowhere and appear on Zoom calls. The rest of your team meets with company leaders in person. Who do you think has the best relationship with the leadership? Not saying it’s impossible to do this remotely but when others don’t it becomes very very hard. Applies to everything, not just sales. Full remote works until someone breaks the chain, then everyone working remotely is at a disadvantage.

I saw a great quote recently that said something like “Everyone loves work from home until you lose a deal to the competition that turned up to your customer in person.” There’s an element of truth to this.

Best advice I’ve heard is to say the draw for living in a city may go away but you need to be close. Living in the middle of nowhere isn’t going to look like such a great idea when people start gathering together again. Maybe not as much as before, but it will still happen. For these reasons I see why the suburbs are seeing a real estate boom in many areas. I’m much less sure about the long term move to places much further away from the cities.

Most people’s TVs at this point are basically a 1080 monitor hooked up to a computer (cable box) so I don’t see this as a big challenge. If a monitor is needed they are quite inexpensive at this point compared to what they used to cost.

Please no more chatbots. Use the underlying tech to build a better search engine, but please stop recreating the concept of a search engine in a “chatbot.”

Half true. While they do merge old concepts into newer things in the process they tend to kill APIs that were in use and other key components that wrecks integrations with it uses of the original product.