strongpigeon

Noteworthy:

- Negative free cash flow for the quarter

- $98B in unrealized gains on equity securities

- Cloud revenue are up 82% to $24.8B

What’s crazy is how Oracle’s free cash flows have gone from “money-printing machine” to deep in the red due to their data center investments. My guess is that some of those cuts are to try to balance that?

At the risk of sounding overly negative, these things are pretty much always vanity projects. Someone wanted a really cool boat and managed to get some investors onboard. It’s more about an aesthetic than a business case.

We’re talking here about a fairly large crew that will transport a small amount of cargo while taking a really long time. On top of that, these aren’t container ship so loading/unloading will take a long time. There is no economic case here.

The only way you can make this somewhat work is by selling the aesthetic/story. E.g.: this coffee was shipped by sailboat. But even then, notice how every company linked in the article of another commenter aren’t actually operating anymore…

Echoing the article, anyone who has experienced both will agree: it’s far easier to work with an under engineered code base than an over engineered one.

The second point is only true if you don't do any RL, right?

This is cool, but wasn't this a "Verily" project about 10 years ago? What is new here and what has happened since then?

It's a luxury tax that only affects people wealthy enough to have a second home in NYC. These people, by virtue of not living there, aren't paying income tax and thus don't contribute as much as someone who is.

The rates sound a bit steep.

Agreed, but you also have to keep in mind that those people don't pay NYC income tax.

This specifically targets people who don't live in New York though (and thus don't pay income tax).

I really liked Google Domains, but alas…

I think some of it is due to the lay off, some of it due to the supply situation not being as bad as SF (though construction has slowed recently), and a lot of it due to interest rates making "effective prices" much higher.

but it always was that way.

I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this.

But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.

You don't have to worry about rent increases

I'd also argue there are financial advantages (on top of the psychological ones) to the price stability as you don't have to hedge against your housing cost shooting up as much.

HOAs can be a big variable cost, yes, especially in the case of underfunded condos associations with a lot of delayed maintenance. Insurance can vary a lot, but is usually a much smaller amount than your mortgage payment (though I only have experience with the PNW).

But yeah, for a single family home in a not-too-flood-prone area it'll be very predictable.

Unlike a startup that pays with illiquid RSUs, Meta paid its people extremely well for its bets though. I dont think Zuck is a great leader at all, but he’s definitely willing to pay for talent.

To add to this, I would assume that advertisers are more diverse and numerous than donors are, therefore reducing the influence any single one of them can have.

Calling it "just a speculative research project" is severely underestimating how big of an effort Fuschia was. At its peak it had a couple hundred eng IIRC.

Not that I disagree with you, but I’ve heard of such tactic being used in some orgs at both Google and Microsoft as well.

It seems like a common conclusion from a management that wants to push for AI adoption. I doubt it’s super effective, but we’ll see how it turns out.

Having worked in big tech, I can almost guarantee you you’re overthinking this.

I’ll never forget how when I was at Google, every email with subject line “An update on X” meant X was getting axed. Like, just say so in the subject line…

Wow, exempting people over 60 from property tax is such a fiscal self-own... The way to do it is to provide a deferral with interest which becomes a lien on your property. This way you can still live in your house, take advantage of your asset appreciating and the county still gets its taxes in the end (and can better handle the delayed cash flows). King County in WA does this for example.

That's 600 million per year in revenue.

According to your math, that's $600 million per day

Meta is going to surpass Google this year in revenue. I agree on the diversification front though

What you're saying is all true, but typically road design influence driving speed more than anything. Changing speed limits rarely has an impact on that (at least in the US).

I know it's an unrealistic pipe dream, but it feels like a privacy-friendly user identity/attestation mechanism is the kind of digital infrastructure that should be provided by the government.

We already trust the government to give proof of identity (through ID cards) and there is already a vast infrastructure network dedicated to that.

But who am I kidding, politicians would never let this happen (at least, not in a privacy preserving way). One can dream though.

That doesn't make sense that a 1024x1024 is cheaper than a 1024x1536, [...]

I think you meant more expensive, right? Because it would make sense for it to be cheaper as there are less pixels.

What's interesting is that ChatGPT ads sit on a spectrum of intent. It's definitely closer to Google in some sense as some of the ads can be in response to a very high intent prompt (what's a good X product), but it does feel like there is some space for brand advertising as well. It also has the potential of having incredible targeting.

I'm curious how they'll grow given that most of the ad higher-ups they've hired are from Meta which is way more used to the low-intent, passive consumption ads business.

I agree with you, but IMO the details are too sparse here to figure out what's really happening. Still, it feels very dangerous to try to go the reseller route first as you lose a ton of control and become dependent on your partner to support all the feature you add yourself in a timely fashion.

Agreed with the sentiment regarding that footage. This felt closer to something you could actually experience rather than another beautiful DSLR shot. Briefly seeing the inside of the capsule, the autofocus taking a long time, the iPhone image processing vibe... Felt 100x more real.

So the first thing that's important to understand is that Excel is the product of another era. One where resources like memory were very constrained and compilers and optimizers weren't as good as they are today (so much so that the Excel team at one point wrote their own because MSVC sucked, but I digress)...

And so, a lot of the core code is used to that. Cell formatting data for example is super tightly packed in deeply nested unions to ensure that as little memory is used to store that info. If something only needs 3 bits, it'll only use 3 bits. The calc engine compiles all of your formulas to its own (IIRC variable-instruction-width) bytecode to make sure that huge spreadsheets can still fit in memory and calc fast.

And a lot of it still carries the same coding and naming practices that it started with in the 80s: Hungarian notation, terse variable and file names, etc. Now, IMO, Hungarian notation by itself is pretty harmless (and even maybe useful in absence of an IDE), but it seemed to encourage programmers to eschew any form of useful information from variable names, requiring you to have more context to understand "why" something is happening. Like, cool, I have a pszxoper now (pointer to zero terminated string of XOper), but why?

So the code is tight, has a lot of optimization baked in and assumes you know a lot about what's happening already.

But more importantly, a lot of "why" information also just lives in people's head. Yes, some teams would have documentation in an ungodly web of OneNote notebooks, or spread across SharePoint pages, which had the least useful search functionality I've ever witnessed, but finding anything you wanted was hard. But that didn't use to matter, since the core team had been there for a long time, so you could ask them question.

That being said, I joined MSFT in 2012 and started working on Excel closer to 2014. At that point, heavyweight like DuaneC (who wrote like 10% of Excel and I don't think I'm exaggerating) had already retired and while others people were very knowledgeable in some areas, nobody seemed to have a good cross view of the whole thing.

You have to understand that I was in the Office Extensibility team. We were building APIs for the whole thing. I had to touch the calc system, the cells and range, the formatting, tables, charts and images (the whole shared oart system was interesting), etc. Answering "How do I do X" was always a quest because you would usually:

- Find 3 different ways of achieving it

- One of them was definitely the wrong way and could make the app crash in some situations (or leak memory)

- All the people on the "blame" had left

- One of them was via the VBA layer which did some weird stuff (good ol' pbobj)

- Be grateful that this wasn't Word because their codebase was much worse

And so, a lot of the API implementation was trial and error and hunting down someone who understood the data structures. The fact that full sync and rebuild took about 6 hours (you ran a command called `ohome` and then you went home) meant that experimenting was sometimes slow (at least incremental builds were OK fast). The only lifeline back then was this tool called ReSearch2 that allowed you to search the codebase efficiently.

But the thing is, once you got thing to work, they worked really well. The core was solid and performant. Just slightly inscrutable at time and not the kind of code you're use to reading outside of Excel.