kentlyons

This is very common in Europe. PhDs are sponsored by a given company

For an overview of the psychology of how people understand things (and don't!) I highly recommend this paper. It highlights a lot of ways our brains take shortcuts in terms of actually understanding things. And that facts play only one particular role amongst many other factors.

Keil, F. C. (2006). Explanation and understanding. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 57(1), 227-254. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3034737/pdf/nihms26...

It just updated. Maybe affected by their own outage!

The actual rule for this part is farther down. Section 465.7b (p161 of the pdf). My reading is basically if the website is showing something that it looks like all of the reviews, then those can't be filtered in this way. But that seems to leave open cherry picking reviews - eg don't imply you're showing them all.

  ... receiving and displaying consumer reviews
  represent most or all the reviews submitted to the website or platform when reviews are being
  suppressed (i.e., not displayable) based upon their ratings or their negative sentiment...

I'm allergic to sawdust so went ceramics instead. Making things is awesome and it's always lots of fun with the anticipation of opening the kiln!

Yep - obviously corner cases are left up to the reader! The other way to think about this is to work backwards from your guess of a final price. So that would give you the size of each step. Likewise 20% is a pretty random number and can also be tuned. The key insight is the data and math should drive the decision.

Assuming you want to maximize income (and in turn, profit), this becomes a math problem based on data. Income = Price * Conversion Rate. So assuming a constant number of people coming in to your funnel (which should be the case since it is ~independent of price), you can keep increasing price (which likely decrease conversion rate, but not always) until Income goes down. To start, you don't know conversion rate, so set price very low (0 is a good start for a few reasons), and every N sales, increase it by 20% until income stops going up.

The city of San Jose is spread over a huge area (a good fraction of Santa Clara Valley aka Silicon Valley). The downtown area of San Jose which you might think of as a city is rather small.

And for small businesses, there is a massive wave of boomers retiring. Either they sell or go out of business. For the better ones, PE is buying and rolling them up.

Was management in place so when the founders exited the company would still grow? With lower valuations (1-3x), the purchaser is often buying a job in some way (either for themselves or needing to find an operator). At 7-10x multiple, the company is already has senior management in place so the new owners would expect continued growth without their own intervention.

There's a few factors. Are there that many, or is there just a lot of news? And related to a lot of news, there are a lot of orgs chasing AI whether they understand it or not. So to that end, as a founder, one could convince the naive (about AI) money to invest. Or more likely, the founders have a track record in some way, and then it is not much different than raising for a traditional startup.

I've thought a lot about these issues - I am actively working on creating new research and then commercializing it. However I think the incentives of investors (VCs and likely angels) are not aligned well with research development. As a result, I've landed on the bootstrap/self fund side of the argument, much like Midjourney. Find the low hanging fruit on the research side that can be monetized, and build off that.

Having worked at both. Hardware companies treat thier software like hardware. They spend a ton of time planning and iterate very slowly. It's very waterfall. I think one of the key advantages Tesla has is they are the opposite. They iterate on their hardware like software. They make hardware changes all the time so they can hill climb faster. And while Toyota invented TPS they seem to be stuck at some local maxima and the scope of changes they make with hardware are limited or slow compared to software.

$1m is what - one person-year, two? Sure that's not enough. However it doesn't mean the api is custom. Just not the same as the public one. For your specific example, Tesla renders thier own map tiles.

Sure just like any (big) company paying for a contract.

So it isn't nothing. It is something. If it were only the states vs the federal government, that would be great! Unfortunately it is also all of the county, city (and other??) local governments as well that have a say. And then in california in particular, things like the environmental protection laws have become weaponized as well to stop.

I suspect it would take something spectacular (like how the interstate system was created) to actually make meaningful progress. And the irony is once it's in place no one could imagine life without it.

The multiple levels of governments and associated regulations is very much preventing it from happening. If any one of them in any of the jurisdictions the train might travel says no (or drags their feet) it doesn't happen.

Several governments have lists of "good" journals that "count" (tenure, grant considerations, etc), and those lists take into account things like impact factor over the past several years. Needless to say, there is a lot of inertia in the system beyond the authors themselves.

Very cool story! How did you grow the group? Was it all through word of mouth from your initial seed group of friends?

In a previous life, I learned that the fleet of all Toyota vehicles out there produced 320.5 million tons of CO2 in 2019. See line 11 of table I on pg 37. https://global.toyota/pages/global_toyota/sustainability/rep... Basically the vast majority of CO2 Toyota produces are from cars on the road.

The problem with swapping is the battery is a very large portion of the residual value of the car. While functionally very different it'd be more like swapping out the engine or transmission in an ICE car. You don't want to roll in with 20k miles on the odometer and roll out with 250k miles!

This is actually the same issue with using EV batteries for grid tied storage. You end up putting (many) more cycles on the battery which devalues your car.

I use an extension to remove them - no affiliation but it seems to work. Chrome: "No YouTube Shorts". Between that, a plugin to remove already watched videos and my ad blocker, youtube is a way better experience!

It also has some more details about wave height: "their models indicate that open-ocean wave heights in the Gulf of Mexico would have exceeded 100 meters (328 feet), with wave heights of more than 10 meters (32.8 feet) as the tsunami approached North Atlantic coastal regions and parts of South America’s Pacific coast."

I went to more parties last year than the previous 10 combined (maybe past 20)! However, I think this is exceptional and it took me seeking out folks that wanted to have fun like that. Life circumstances and mismatched schedules get in the way for sure and I still think there is a strong covid hangover for most people.

It is the part just before you cut in my quote: "it's playing against a different set of customer values". That is how Christensen defines a new market disruption. That is not enough for a successful new market disruption, but is one of his key characteristic of one. So I believe the values people are finding in their purchase of a Tesla are radically different than those buying ICE vehicles.

There's a few things to unpack here. One is the perception of the iPhone. Eg here's a quote from PC Magazine I saved when it came out: "Poor business e2mail and PIM connectivity. Bad audio quality on phone calls. Tons of GSM buzz on nearby speakers. Virtual keyboard hard to type on. No phone functionality with iPod speaker docks. It’s the best portable media player ever. It’s possibly the most fun we’ve ever had with a handheld device. It browses the Web like a champ. But poor phone call performance and missing messaging options make us unwilling to recommend it as a phone." There are similar other criticisms. It was not part of the category of smartphones at the time as seen by the people using them.

The early criticisms about Tesla's build quality and a lot of the arguments about a battery not being good enough seem to follow a similar argument. Is the original Model S as good as a top of the line gas car at the time? By most metrics used at the time, no. The criticisms in the peer comment by lbsnake7 are similar - those are legacy metrics of a car. However it did find a customer base that valued what it offered, bad seats and poor panel gaps and all (just like the GSM buzz and non-replaceable battery).

As far as the timeline, the slowness has surprised me a bit but I think comes down to a couple of things. One is the turn over time of getting a new phone vs a new car. Cars are much slower. And another (which might be related) is the price point of cars being orders of magnitude larger than phones. And finally, it's taken a good while for Tesla to ramp - it's been supply constrained forever (although there might be signs of that shifting).

Using Christensen's theory against Tesla is an interesting one and one I've thought about. I largely think batteries and EV's are a red herring as far as Tesla goes and this type of analysis. I think it is much closer to a new market disruption. Tesla is playing a different game than the rest of the auto industry - it's playing against a different set of customer values (electric might be part of it, but only part). In this way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry. The iPhone targeted different values than the dominant "smartphones" of the day. The attacks against Tesla to me feel very analogous to the attacks agains the iPhone. But I guess only time will tell.

As an aside, I actually think the advantages of Tesla are its willingness to constantly improve the product - from software OTAs that make the cars better years after purchase to fundamentally reworking manufacturing (eg mega casting). They've taken Toyota's Kaizen and cranked it up to 11.

As far as the rest of the auto industry, I think there is probably a cheaper worse play (low end disruption). EVs are much simpler to make and that's going to wreak havoc on the auto supply chain (needing it to be much smaller/leaner). And it would also seem the dealer's days are numbered - both as a dated sales model as well as their revenue drying up (fewer repairs to make). Do any of the encumbants disrupt themselves (knowing it is inevitable)? Or is there another player that comes in? (And I don't think Tesla really fits this role).

The actual paper says something slightly different: "Fortunately, the same research that demonstrates people's pessimism about talking to strangers also shows that this pessimism is often misplaced—strangers are more willing to talk than people anticipate (Cooney et al., 2021; Epley & Schroeder, 2014; Sandstrom & Boothby, 2021; Schroeder et al., 2021), conversations tend to go overwhelmingly better than people predict (Epley & Schroeder, 2014; Sandstrom & Boothby, 2021; Sandstrom & Dunn, 2014)"

It wasn't entirely clear from this article, but the intervention itself is the scavenger hunt and associated instructions. From the supplementary material: "Participants in the treatment condition were asked to talk to the person for at least a couple minutes, whereas participants in the control condition were simply asked to observe the person for at least a couple minutes". And from the related work this is based on previous research: "This suggests a promising intervention strategy: give people concentrated and repeated practice talking to strangers, so that they may realize their fears are exaggerated."

They give the full proper citation for referencing the work: @inproceedings{reda2022film, title = {FILM: Frame Interpolation for Large Motion}, author = {Fitsum Reda and Janne Kontkanen and Eric Tabellion and Deqing Sun and Caroline Pantofaru and Brian Curless}, booktitle = {European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)}, year = {2022} }

I wonder about airship based (inland) cruises. The cruise industry is on the order of $20b annual and I could imagine a similar experience by air, going no where fast, and opening up a very unique tourism experience to very different types of places.