powowow

I love the way WA votes. I've lived in a half dozen US states, and it is by far the best experience. It makes it extremely easy to vote thoughtfully.

No need for a smartphone. The information packet + drop box / postal vote is fantastic.

It is reasonable and normal for governments to care when other governments attack their citizens.

One main benefit of a return is that it creates costs to Amazon (shipping, returns processing, then disposing of the returned product). I'd like to think this makes Amazon marginally more likely to do the right thing, because it takes the profit out of the problematic products.

Your AWS conspiracy theory is bizarre.

Yah good point.

Most small businesses would suffer no harm at all from an adversary with an initial $10MM allocated toward an attack. After all, most businesses have no employees who have ever done anything even remotely questionable. And besides, it's super cheap and easy to win in court if truth and justice are on your side. (and the same in print; there's no way to for an investigative journalist to create disproportionately bad press)

You're definitely correct, right, and very smart. I agree with all of your points.

Cool.

Did you know that Peter Thiel, in his own words, decided to "create a shell company to hire former investigative reporters and lawyers to _find_ causes of action against Gawker", and to then give it a starting timeline and budget of "three to five years and $10 million"?

I can't help but laugh that a guy who calls himself 'Smirking Revenge' is a stan for Peter Thiel's revenge by proxy lawsuit. If you were a fictional character, I'd think the author was being a bit heavy-handed with your aptronym.

To clarify, you are ok with billionaires having the ability to use the legal system to destroy any organization they personally dislike?

If Peter Thiel wants to pretend he cares about privacy, he should shut down Clearview and Palantir.

This wouldn't be terribly surprising. My wife's internal combustion car has a CVT that emulates an automatic with gears and shift points, presumably because that felt more natural to drivers than having the engine just run at optimal RPM.

It's really fucking clear-cut from a risk management point of view.

Yah, it's a real shame that the fossil fuel (and adjacent) industries spent decades spreading misinformation and disinformation, and funding the hell out of any effort that created even the tiniest bit of doubt in the public mind (be it fringe research or straight PR).

I'm a Sr Manager at a FAANG company (and I started here in my 40s). My direct reports include other SDMs, senior product managers, and staff/principal engineers.

You mention "trying" for management. If you haven't previously managed people, then you probably won't be able to get a good SDM role directly. Instead, your best path would be to be hired as an SDE, demonstrate strong managerial bones (mentorship, communication, process orientation), and then transition to SDM after a few years.

If you've mostly been an engineer, then you may want to learn more about what's expected from different levels of engineer so you can determine, realistically, where your experience will be sufficient, and where there will be gap.

We generally trust that every page of a kids book will be roughly as expected given the title and author of the book. We trust the same of things like PBS kids programs.

The same trust cannot be extended to YouTube.

In my last job we were sufficiently sophisticated users of AWS that we routinely had conversations with product managers to learn if specific features were on the roadmap, and if so, if there was an ETA. We had these conversations because we were debating whether we wanted to write a solution of our own, or if we wanted to wait for a generalized one to be released.

That said, the product managers generally left us with information such as "this is actively being worked on", "this is planned work in the upcoming quarter, but it could change", "this is on the roadmap without a date", and "this is not on the roadmap". No specific dates promised, but it was still good enough for our purposes.

I hope they weren't using our requests to push for specific dates, internally.

A good way to have a great annual return in year y+1 is to have a 21% decline during December of year y.

That's absolutely true if you're selling to businesses (especially large businesses).

I had the same experience hosting on AWS (having previously hosted on colocated bare metal server). An entire category of sales friction almost entirely disappeared, and it was friction that was common on the largest and most profitable accounts.

But I thought you said nobody ever did large acquisitions for customers....

weird, I must be thinking of somebody else. Since it would make no sense for you to try to take both of those sides at once.

Microsoft licensed their early OS. Dreamworks led with SKG and the tech followed. Oracle always had meaningful tech competition and fought with sales/marketing.

Google is pretty true, though.

I said software business, so I'm not sure why you're bringing up AMD or Intel.

As for billion dollar acquisitions.... Visio, GitHub, Yammer, LinkedIn, Instagram, Parse, etc.... shit-tons of them are done for market reasons.

Can you name, say, three notable software businesses whose advantage was hard-to-replicate tech?

hard to develop technology is a very narrow moat.

You have the first problem that well-funded competitors can almost certainly replicate whatever you built if they care to do so.

You then have a second problem that well-funded competitors can almost certainly market inferior tech as being equal to or superior to yours, if they care to do so.

The fed holds US treasury bonds as collateral.

Would you be worried about default if you loaned me a million dollars, and I gave you a million dollars of treasuries as collateral?

It blows my mind that people are getting all worried about fully collateralized short term interbank lending.

You sound like an asshole.

meanwhile Sam Altman is writing essays about how China enjoys greater freedom than America.

If you think I'm kidding: https://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove

I think our best hope is a multi-pronged approach that includes reusing the output (as you suggest), as well as reducing the output. This has a dramatically better chance of overall success than any single-pronged approach.

As such, I heartily endorse your 'how do we make use of that?' attitude, but I also will never agree with your assertion that our best hope is to accept it as a new norm, or to accept it's a losing battle.

It's just like how in business you want to get new customers, but you also want to reduce costs. Any company that chooses to care about only one of those things is doomed in the long-run.