skellera

Many people don't understand this, even big tech engineers. They see LLMs as a bottleneck. It's more that they don't understand how to use it to multiply their skills, just basics and code gen.

He also ruined the Vision Pro on his way out. Engineers wanted to do wireless to a Mac mini-like hub (not standalone) so the hub could have more computing power. It’s a dev device that was supposed to be the very best experience for developing the future standalone AR/VR device. But Ives forced them to do full standalone. Increasing weight, decreasing power, wasting time re-engineering the device.

I think less people care about it politically than you think. Most people I know who have Teslas stand by the product even through Elon’s dumb shit.

I think people care more about their own convenience. There’s nothing else in our market that’s even comparable. People talk a lot of shit and it wasn’t great to start but FSD is on a different level now, especially on newer cars like the new Model Y. Having a car that mostly drives itself is the best purchase I’ve ever made.

It doesn’t seem to be slowing down sales in Seattle. New Model Ys are everywhere here.

That’s an amazing story. The wife really gathered together all the right people to create a phage treatment to save her husband’s life. Great job on all the doctors and scientists that figured out how to make it so quickly.

It’s a pretty common phrase for “what’s the ultimate goal?”

I don’t think it’s meant to be taken as a chess metaphor.

Downstream impact is gamed internally at Amazon.

People crucified Sears for making teams compete internally but that’s literally what’s happening at Amazon at a larger scale. Teams and orgs regularly push back against helping each other. Will not waste resources to help others.

I don’t believe Amazon has a good outlook over 5 years unless they get lucky with random bets. They no longer innovate, they just copy and try to compete with scale. Even then, it doesn’t work because no one working on that product actually cares about the problem so startups can easily outcompete with “customer obsession.”

Amazon has started to refuse returns on many items. One of their core customer value mechanisms has been destroyed.

Online shopping requires returns. Removing that option significantly reduces trust and value.

Even the chronic pain patients should not have had the amounts prescribed to them that they were. Doctors were incentivized to give as much as possible. Creating addicts in people who may otherwise would not have been.

I personally knew people getting more than a cancer patient should’ve been given for day to day chronic pain.

I’m sorry if you were personally affected by regulation but that doesn’t mean they didn’t cause the crisis.

Are you one of the lawyers?

None of that would’ve happened if they didn’t start the flood of opiates to begin with. It wasn’t a marginally increased issue, they flooded the market with it. People with minor pain were getting massive bottles of OxyContin and selling or using it. This led to pill mills and crooked doctors. You had normal people getting hooked on high dosages. These are not the people who were using opioids before that. Pills made it seem safer. Most users don’t start with heroin, they start with pills because of exactly that. “A doctor prescribed it, must be okay.”

This is some insane logic to absolve them of responsibility. I say this as someone who also saw the problem firsthand. Was regulation handled badly? Sure but there’s no way you can say they didn’t start the problem.

Maybe the extra cost is to look into bringing it down without destroying it. Would be good to study it for data on long term spacecraft.

Really sad to see something so amazing get picked apart for its value.

I really wish Paul set up endowments to continue his projects. I don’t know if he knew how his sister would handle his estate but it doesn’t seem like what he wanted.

When we are paying for it, we should care about those things.

James Hoffman is a coffee YouTuber. From community post by James Hoffman:

I just wanted to write a quick update post about the Hames Joffmann channel. For those unfamiliar, it was a channel that recut and recomposed my videos delightfully and hilariously, and did so having asked and with my full permission. Recently, @YouTube removed the channel, citing a violation of its policy regarding impersonation. (Some people have asked if I had anything to do with the takedown - I did not.) The channel was clearly labelled as not being me, and they appealed against YouTube's decision. This was denied, and the channel was completely removed. I contacted YouTube through my partner manager and through their support channels, explaining that they'd made a mistake and advocating for the channel's return. The response from YouTube kind of broke my brain. I hope Hames has the masters and reuploads them to a new channel, but I'd understand if they didn't want to. It just seems very disappointing and also weird for YouTube to advocate taking legal action against them.

————

Response from YouTube:

Hi James,

I've followed up with our internal team regarding the channel (@hamesjoffmann). Unfortunately, it seems the best course of action is to file a formal legal appeal.

I don’t understand why Mazda doesn’t just make a drift-tuned electric car. You could do amazing stuff with software focused on that driving style.

A true electric successor to the RX-7 would capture so much attention.

Why aren’t they naming the “telecommunications store”?

Does knowing the employee did it make the company liable for damages?

If you own a Vizio, your viewing data is collected and sold to advertisers anyways. They have ACR software running that can recognize any content playing on the tv. Casted, OTA, streaming… they’re all logged and tracked for advertisers.

Inscape is their ACR/Ads subsidiary. https://www.inscape.tv/

Other TVs are doing similar things but Vizio pioneered it. That’s how they subsidized their TVs to offer the lowest prices and the rest of the industry followed.

Vizio TVs are literally data collection devices.

If you trust that the people you are working with are working towards the same goal, disagree and commit is important. You are not going to be right 100% of the time.

If the group is saying X is the right way to go and you’ve already given your reason why you think Y, you should disagree and commit. If you sit there complaining for weeks that they should be doing Y without any new information, you’re just being a shitty teammate and dragging everyone down.

The main point for the commit part is setting aside your ego to move the team forward. Most decisions are two way doors. If X doesn’t work out then try Y but don’t complain, work less hard, or sabotage because you didn’t get your way.

One big exception is if someone is making a decision that goes against company principles or morals.

Seems like the in between of a managed service and raw AWS trying to take advantage of individual AWS accounts having a free tier.

So have the customer make the account, take advantage of the free 10k emails a month to claim a lower price.

I don’t see the point in it. I doubt there will be much customer service if problems happen. Maybe if you’re trying to launch a free newsletter or something but otherwise it’s worth paying for peace of mind and potential lost time. You don’t want to deal with emails not getting sent or issues with the service when you’re focused on growing your company.

Create IDE configs and other guardrails to limit churn and discussions on already determined style for your team.

Clear goals and acceptance criteria.

Marketed to the general public but will be used by pros.

The goal is excitement and investment in the app ecosystem so, when they figure out the form factor, the cheaper/lighter/more useful future device is a bigger hit.

If they work better now (maybe limitations in the past like transfer speeds), what’s the problem?

Yeah, I love it. Learn about the entire process and keep going rather than cutting short after a perceived failure.

Shout out to Destin from SmarterEveryDay for his love of PRDs.

Learn about and see how it’s made – https://youtu.be/xe-f4gokRBs

Encasing a shattering drop in glass –https://youtu.be/C1KT8PS6Zs4

The process the team uses in the second video to freeze the break in glass is pretty awesome! (If you’re into that kind of thing)

I think edge is doing the most interesting customer focused features for browsers that I’ve seen in a long time. I get that some might feel it’ll get bloated but most are configurable.

It’s not for everyone but it’s interesting to see someone trying new things.

I have 3 Gerton desks that will probably last my whole life. Solid beech.

They have also discontinued it. Probably related to this article since they were made with solid wood.

I know I won’t convince you but I think Edge is better than stock chrome. It has active development on interesting features.

Weird to think they’re shoving their ecosystem. It’s a beta. You’re welcome to wait for the full release.

Amazon hasn’t been “customer obsessed” in years. The leadership there is “promotion obsessed.” Bloated management with too many empire builders. Make big flashy features with no real need or something that optimizes for short term target numbers. Working backwards from the customer is never a thing anymore. This is why terrible decisions like 3rd party sellers (diminishing Amazon’s trust while increasing profits) will continue to happen.

AWS and their massive logistics platform will support this terrible management for awhile but it will continue to destroy the brand.

I’m sure things used to be this way but “we’re like a startup” is so overused in big tech these days. It’s usually an excuse for something wrong rather than the benefits of a startup.

I wish we were building for customers instead of building for my or someone in my leadership chain’s promotion. I think most companies start with that focus then lose it after a certain size. Most of the engineers working on projects don’t even care about the product.

Some key facts, like the one you mentioned, aren’t visible if you don’t have a WSJ account.

It’s just a bait headline for a normal cycle. They even say it is just more people included in the 10% because of strong recent hiring increasing the total. What a weird article.

Not sure if this is a joke or not.

What makes you say this? Is there any reason they would do that?