lchengify

Very cool. I've also had to do multiple versions of something like this ... also for healthcare. I got very good at Sikuli and Charles Web Debugging proxy back in the day.

Yea that could have been worded better. My point was more that the banks didn't turn into software (an app) with just developers working on it, just that the labor force that was doing teller operations moved.

Two anecdotes I'll share:

First: Most people believe it was Netflix that killed Blockbuster, but that's not strictly correct. It was the combination of Netflix and Redbox that really sealed the deal for Blockbuster (and video rental generally). It normally takes not one, but at least two things to really fill the full functionality of a old paradigm. Also it's human nature to focus heavily on one thing (Blockbuster was aware of Netflix) but lose sight of getting flanked by something else.

Second: Not listed here is how banks themselves have changed to be almost entirely online, which in many cases is more of a outsourcing play than a labor destruction play. My favorite example of this is Capital One, where the vast majority of their credit card operations literally cannot be solved in a branch. You must call them to say, resolve a fraud dispute. Note that this still requires staffing and is (not yet) fully automated, just not branch staffing. It doesn't make sense to staff branches to do that.

I was so proud of myself in college when I could finally name all those books in the bar scene.

I wonder if I can strap this to my Roborock from 2020 and train it to pick up socks.

Roborock sells a new model that does this [1] but it costs $3,000 and I refuse to pay that on principle when I know it's likely a straightforward model with some unsupervised training.

Also I can probably fix it easier once it (definitely) breaks at some point due to collisions.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHVQxXVgBm4

So I've driven Route 50 between Tahoe and Placerville a few times. Many of these times the weather has been quite bad. Many of these times I've had to wait for hours while an accident was cleared, or 12 foot snow drifts were plowed.

When I'm traveling in mountain snow, I'm always very neurotic about prep. AWD or 4x4, water, chains, food, emergency kits, etc ... I always assume I could be stuck for 24 hours or more.

In the meantime, I am constantly shocked by how many people make this trek with little or no respect for how deadly snow can be. The worst of it is when it puts others in danger: I'll never forget seeing a front-wheel drive sedan repeatedly driving up, then slipping back on a steep hill, while a line of 20 cars waited behind it.

Part of it is just not knowing (I grew up in the east coast), but part of it is just human nature to not understand some things to be inherently dangerous. Snow and cold looks so serene, but cold in it's various forms has killed many more people than heat.

I'm not that old, and I still remember being really disappointed when something wasn't in my home (book) Encyclopedia. Then you would trudge to the library to find maybe one book on the obscure topic.

You could request a book be sent from another library, but that would take weeks, and you had no idea what was in that book.

It was wild. Most things were just unknown, or whatever you parents told you.

Didn't know he worked on Black & White. Black & White was really ahead of it's time for 2001, it did a much better job of having NPC simulations in groups based on how you played as a god.

Was shocked to hear this news. I worked for Google years ago but I was in the NYC office, so we didn't run into the YouTube folks much.

Opinions about YouTube may be mixed here on HN, but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years. If it weren't buried inside Alphabet, Youtube would be worth on the order of $400 billion, more than Disney and Comcast combined. It's a weird mix of a huge creator monetization network, a music channel, an education platform, a forever-store of niche content, and a utility.

It's also not a business that rested on it's laurels. It's easy to forget how novel creator monetization was when YouTube adopted it. They do a lot of active work to manage their creators, and now have grown into a music and podcast platform that is challenging Apple. To top it off, YouTube TV, despite costing just as much as cable, is objectively a good product.

Few products have the brand, the reach, monetization, and the endurance that YouTube has had within Google. And I know for a fact that this is in no small part due to the way it was managed.

I've probably watched tens of thousands of hours of YouTube at this point. Some of it sublime, some of it absurd, some of it critical for my work or my degree. I couldn't imagine a world without it.

RIP.

coal (a fuel you can run the engine on) is of course going to be very cheap and abundant directly above the mine where it is being produced and for the atmospheric engine to make sense as an investment the fuel must be very cheap indeed.

So effectively, once coal was discovered as a fuel where spending small amounts was well worth mining large amounts, steam engines were bootstrapped into product/market fit right on top of the use case.

Fun fact: Modern off-grid pump-jacks operate in a similar manner. They use the natural gas that comes from the well to power the pump that pumps the oil [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpjack

I was perusing some Simpsons clips this afternoon and came across a story to the effect of "So and so didn't want to play himself, so Dan Castellaneta did the voice."

IANAL, but parody and criticism are covered under Fair Use doctrine for Copyright law in the United States [1]. The Simpsons generally falls into that category, which is why they rarely get into trouble.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Ok I didn't believe you at first, but holy crap you're right, they didn't even do the voices.

Not going to lie part of my childhood died a little :(. "Help" is them though I watched that too.

If you have time, I highly recommend reading other articles in Bret's blog. His write-up of how the roman legions got paid was my favorite read for a few weeks [1]. The detail of articles like this are right up there with the History of Rome podcast.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2023/06/16/collections-how-to-raise-a-rom...

This only would have worked if it was animated. The 1977 Hobbit film which was produced for NBC [1] was a excellent adaptation, and Yellow Submarine is in the same style. I would argue Yellow Submarine also has many of the same themes, if not more absurdist than fantasy.

Also fun fact I just realized you can stream Yellow Submarine for free on archive.org [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1977_film)

[2] https://archive.org/details/yellow-submarine-1968_film

I used to use the WeWork on the bottom floor (technically partial basement). This is definitely the vibe: Huge open floor, no windows. WeWork did an OK job trying to light it but, I could never shake the feeling that it felt like a scene from Fallout.

My two cents: If this building ever becomes popular again, it'll be because of the location and not because of the building itself. It's reasonably close both to "Van Mission" (the rebranding of that part of Market Street for high rise residential), a BART stop, and Hayes Valley. It's probably one good Twitter-esque city tax subsidy away from being fully occupied in 5 years.

Amazon and Uber are definitely different, but in 2003 Amazon's market cap was about $21B, or ~$36B in today's dollars. Uber is actually bigger than that in value today (~$144.11B).

Amazon was far from a dominant player in 2003, and AWS wasn't launched publicly until 2006.

From a product standpoint, as others have stated, Uber is a real-time services marketplace vs Amazon which is more about physical goods (again, excluding AWS, which is technically a service). Most of their value is putting all the work into the ground to keep the marketplace balanced, which is a tricky marketing and econometrics problem. One need not look farther than Lyft to see how hard it is to keep the "5 minutes away or less" guarantee.

Also to those who think the app is a non-trivial technical achievement, I would recommend reading some of the blog posts that go into some of the crazy technical challenges they hit [1]. Specifically in some cases, in order to make the app work in all geo's, they ran up against practical limits to binary size at Apple. Not to mention that geo / waypoint data is a genuine "big-data" problem and not easily reproduced by just any company.

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/uber-app-rewrite-yolo/

This is correct. For the most part, you are taking the money from your profit centers to invest in new initiatives. Could be geo's, could also be verticals, etc.

This is not at all unusual for a company where the top line is growing. As a point of comparison, Amazon was founded in 1994 and not profitable until 2003.

So if MS-DOS 4 was released in 1986, and it is now 2024, that's a 37 year gap between release and open source.

That means Windows XP should be open sourced by ... 2038. Not as far away as it seems. I'll add it to my calendar.

I have a lot of tech / healthcare couples in my friend group and this is definitely the arrangement. Especially true since healthcare careers have very different timelines than tech.

In once instance, one partner is a clinician and absolutely has to be on site 5 days a week, not counting on-call. The other works 100% remote but the company is global, so depending on the week they may be on Europe time or Australia time.

This is definitely a work arrangement I couldn't have imagined being common 10 years ago. This shift will likely be one of the defining economic changes between the 10's and the 20's.

Honestly, makes sense. This is how much of finance runs their models.

Engineers, saving your program time and money out of the sheer laziness of not wanting to make a new XML format for an instrumentation project. This is how progress is made in the world, I guess.

I've worked in healthcare, fintech, and ads and this is one thing I've done in all three fields. I swear i've written or debugged XML parsers in 20 different languages at this point just so I didn't have to get consensus on a new format.

If you're interested in a visual of how different welds interact with the metal, I watched this video on SpaceX's Starship welding that was helpful [1].

Something I try to remember is that most non-organic materials gain their properties from a precise lattice structure. This often doesn't come across when looking straight at the chemistry equations. Welding both disrupts and rebuilds this lattice structure, which is why it requires so much skill to do at volume.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP8Hbr2jL_c

Only tangentially related, but I highly recommend watching Veritasium's YouTube video on electricity if you're curious as to how Maxwell's fields create the current / amp abstractions in EE [1].

It's a common misconception that electrons or current transfer energy. In reality it's the electric field that exists between the wires that is doing the heavy lifting, the electrons in the wires are just controlling the field.

This has always confused me and I was very irritated when I first learned electromagnetics about how rote all the initial learnings are. I wish more work was put earlier into making everything relate back to Maxwell's equations to make it make sense.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHIhgxav9LY

FWIW, I don't think the author is talking about executives. I think he's talking about people on the level of ultra high-net-worth individual (UHNWI). People with roughly $30m or more in investable assets.

People like that prefer to be focused on exactly whatever their building, and babysitting the money is rarely that thing. They often approach their private wealth manager with a broad plan on goals, and the PWM goes out and executes them with light direction. There are lawyers and accountants in the loop as well, all working on paper to manage the cash pile. It's a long term, multi-generational relationship that often involves multiple parties, one of which is often some or many governments.

In addition, the PWM in this position prefers to get the client directly on the phone when possible. This is both to manage the relationship, and to sell novel finance products, often ones that aren't available on the open market.

Until we get AGI, it's just not quite there to be outsourced to AI. People at that level really prefer having a person be responsible.

For those who don't know, Josh Brown runs Ritholtz Wealth Management and hosts The Compound Podcast [1]. Probably one of the most insightful finance podcasts that covers a wide range of topics.

Highly recommend subscribing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@TheCompoundNews

Honestly Unity has had a slew of problems for years. Completely useless purchase of WETA tech, product not improving markedly, ad network (IronSource) issues, problematic CEO.

The price hike fight was the last straw. They've had a ton of time to fix these issues but haven't responded to users asks, up to the point where viable open-source alternatives are starting to take root.

I am supremely curious about this myself.

My guess would be their ad spend is bad in comparison to the other networks (Google, Facebook, TikTok). Could be because their audience isn't worth as much, could be because the ad formats are bad, could be because they can't get advertisers. But unless they are serving ads from Google's network, my guess is they are 4th place at best.

As noted on other threads, their streaming infrastructure must be a burning dumpster fire of money. Live streaming is super hard since you can't edge cache it, and it requires actual hard computer engineering to make work. If a mere mortal company were to try to run a clone of Twitch on AWS, it would run out of money in days. It also likely uses the same hardware as other high-value products, such as AI.

Not mentioned in the article but definitely the elephant in the room: The rise of TikTok streaming [1]

TikTok doesn't focus on gamers, but attention is finite. TikTok surpassed Twitch a while ago in revenue and it's accelerated since then. TikTok + Youtube (very profitable) makes Twitch at best a flat third place. Not a great business to be in when ZIRP ends.

Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, the business remains unprofitable, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

This ... is wild, I had no idea Twitch wasn't profitable. If you're pushing that much live video you really need to find a business model that works, especially when Youtube arguably does it better. Kind of surprised it took this long to start to wind it down.

[1] https://appfigures.com/resources/insights/20210924/amp?f=4

Just to add on, a good way to learn these terms is to look at the history of neural networks rather than looking at transformer architecture in a vacuum

This [1] post from 2021 goes over attention mechanisms as applied to RNN / LSTM networks. It's visual and goes into a bit more detail, and I've personally found RNN / LSTM networks easier to understand intuitively.

[1] https://medium.com/swlh/a-simple-overview-of-rnn-lstm-and-at...

That’s a function of the train speed. If the train traveled at 300 mph, then LA<->SF becomes faster than Brightline’s 180 mile LA to Vegas route, which looks like it will average 100 mph.

Even with the speed, you would have to do LA <-> SF as the crow flies. California HSR Phase 1 is 520 mi.

On the other hand, LA <-> LV is effectively flat, at least from where the Brightline leaves in Palmdale. The difference between the two projects is pretty stark.