wintogreen74

the start-up situation sounds pretty similar

> elite takeover of the internet.

Wasn't the internet solely the domain of the (techno) elite for a very long time? It's the masses that have wrecked what we had, the the "new" elite profiting off of them. Maybe the societal gains outweigh what we lost, but if you were part of the original elite 20+ years ago, you're now in a much worse place.

what about the hardware that significantly leverages their non-game software? I think the full ramifications of what they're doing with mobile gaming have not yet been felt.

Pretty big stretch to compare a massive disruption to the medium with a massive disruption to the content. The press is far closer to the web than generative content. The output from AI is closer to the unibomber's manifesto, and the only entity calling for burning detractors at the stake is vested-interest individuals like you, and AI itself.

This sounds suspiciously like some form of Stockholm syndrome.

Not this big, but very large with a market cap of 13B.

In tech circles, a very well known story though.

> just another entitled, out of touch zillionaire,

You can level a lot of criticism at Jeff but I don't think this one applies.

Memories are short, but Twilio was built when doing what seemed obvious - add an API to telecom services - was really hard. It's what Stripe is (doing, not done) to banking & payment, what countless companies have failed to do with Healthcare... I met Jeff in the early days and the fact that he (a) managed to stay the CEO through this growth & timeline, and (b) gave few enough sh!ts to maintain a hacker dev mentality makes him a notable standout. I'm not surprised that lots of people with legitimate viewpoints and perspectives DO/DID NOT like him or his approach. To me, that's a feature; we need less CEOs and senior executives who try to be all things to all people.

And I think most consumers don't want these things. When given the choice they've consistently taken cost and convenience over openness, privacy or durability.

Doesn't this imply that there's an entire group of people who are now better off, if they have to choose between (a) the relatively new availability of cheap clothes or food and (b) going without? Previously they went without?

that's a different website: "Do It Yourself, Blind; Repair!"

YT is a great resource for fixing things like appliances, but the devices themselves have gotten (1) shittier, (2) harder to repair and (3) more expensive custom parts - that are themselves less durable. Example: the slide-out for the top rack of my dishwasher exploded, sending ball-bearings everywhere. The replacement part (mostly plastic) cost > $50 and to replace required I disconnect the water & power, uninstall the unit and access the 2 screws on the outside. Great for speeding up assembly in a factory, but ridiculous for any other purpose.

the only alternative for a lot of positions then, is administering a separate job for every single person. no thanks.

I had rack mount equipment running in my house for a while; not sure how he sleeps with it in his bedroom. The best part of the "cloud" was getting all those boat anchors out of my life.

except the ease and frictionless experience of iPads and most phones, combined with curated ecosysmtems of apps, means you never have to see how the sausage is made, or learn how to make your own

Kids don't really use email these days, or usb sticks. They share more than we ever did, but directly via apps or mobile which doesn't work with "files". It seems reasonable in this case the thing missing is the abstraction of a "file". Think of how your phone works, you share pictures, video, text, posts, etc. but never files. Sharing to email is my phone's 5th or 6th priority option. It comes after a boatload of social media options, messaging, online storage, even some sort of AWS application I've never even launched.

I've done this too, and it also took me multiple (3!) tries to get through the entire thing. I interleaved it last fall/winter with Ben Eater's amazing series on building an 8-bit computer on breadboards. I bought everything over several months from China, then built the subsystems as the parts arrived over the winter. You should do that next! Aside from being (maybe even more) rewarding, it looks damn impressive to see all the flashing LEDs and understand what's happening.

The book is a great example of how we do pretty much everything with computers today: abstraction. You can definitely learn how a transistor works but this book/course explicitly starts with "you've got a NAND chip - GO!"

Saying, "I'm sorry; I've made a mistake" is the killer disarming technique for even the most emotional conflict. Not sure if it's our pride or fear of liability but western culture is very hesitant to say "sorry" - other than the fake one "I'm sorry if anyone interpreted my actions|remarks|words as ..." - that doesn't count.

The key being "supported" - that definition has changed dramatically in the past 50 years, and what you're referencing in the US was the middle class, not those living in poverty (then or now).

> The most successful engineers and researchers I know personally; are not particularly social people

Could you imagine how successful they'd be if they added those skills?

Similar experience: An order that was supposedly in an Amazon facility < 30 min from me on the 8th, was not delivered as promised by the 13th, then stated delivery between the 14-20th due to "severe bad weather" and as of today still not delivered. We haven't had snow in weeks and this is the mildest winter in several years. Now it says "if not delivered by tomorrow you can come back the next day and get a refund".

it's not supposed to be a secret in the "something you know" way, but rather "something you have" - i.e. the physical card. If they store it you no longer need the physical card for an entire family of attacks & frauds.

any chemists here who could calc if this is cost effective?

autocomplete accurately took care of a lot of the boilerplate; that low-hanging fruit has been picked. AI is not doing the same IME, the pay-off has been a lot slower coming, and sometimes it's making the work more painful.

the old joke about Amazon (which was never really true) was they lost pennies on every sale and made it up in volume. Anybody can grow revenue; the trick is to grow it faster than the cost of new revenue, and with a positive margin.

The key is this is how you get a (typically) non-amortizable asset off the balance sheet and expensed on the income statement when all those synergies and economies of scale promised by the (no longer with the company) executive who pushed the deal don't materialize.

Sounds like you just invented the modern version of Windows Longhorn

We use Fivetran for big data sets but less frequent one-way syncs as you reference, and it is great but VERY expensive.

you mean like smoking and drinking?