I never understood this. Is this why the cubicles are always full in the office? WTF I go in there take a dump and leave while the people on each side are just silent the whole time. I can think of much better places to think.
I worked on an app that sent an internal email with stack trace whenever an unhandled exception occurred. Worked great until the day when there was an OOM in a tight loop on a box in Asia that sent a few hundred emails per second and saturated the company WAN backbone and mailboxes of the whole team. Good times.
Depends what you mean by Microsoft. Azure is its biggest division. OpenAI stake is its most important. I think xbox/gaming has more revenue than Windows now. Even LinkedIn is a huge part of the company.
I have a decent amount of second hand experience with used cars, through my brother who is a mechanic and spent a number of years working at a used car dealership. Hyundai/Kia is the only company he ever had to do engine replacements for at said dealership, and he did dozens. All under 200k km (frequently right after the extended warranty on the engines ran out, and occasionally on the second or even third engine for the vehicle). These are cars with good service history and otherwise in excellent condition. Sometimes cars they got on trade, sometimes purchased from auctions, sometimes customer cars (after they were sold). No rhyme or reason, just a genuinely bad design that was “fixed” but never fixed.
The only other universally-bad major component is JATCO CVT transmissions. I think his record was an Infiniti QX60 that had 95k km and a blown transmission. Most small vehicle/sedan CVTs he did were in the 160-190k km range, with some lasting as long as 250k km. And of course they were not repairable, since even if parts were available, the entire thing grenades leaving basically nothing left to rebuild.
Point being, “one engine issue due to a manufacturing flaw” is drastically underselling the issue, at best. It is an incorrectly-engineered engine that fails prematurely when built within specification, except when the tolerance stackup lines up in your favour and you perform much more frequent maintenance than prescribed. Oh and the affected engines were manufactured over about 15 years (and there’s signs that their current GDI 4-cylinders are still affected).
The theta 2 is installed in millions. It the failure rate was even close to 20% within 30k miles dealers would be overwhelmed.
It may it be as well designed and that is responsible for some failures when combined with poor maintenance. I think the manufacturing issues bumped it to a percentage that is noticeable.
However. It can't be a significant amount because it would collapse the dealer network
The E-GMP Hyundai/Kia EV platform is also unreliable. Around 1 in every 50 of these cars will suddenly lose power while driving due to ICCU failure. Search any forum for the EV6 or Ioniq 5 and this is all over. Mine broke down and got towed back to the shop so many times, where it sat for ages because my dealer was sharing a single EV-qualified tech with 2 other dealers. I eventually had the car Lemon Law'd. As far as I know this issue is still unsolved after 4+ years. (The software recall made no difference.) I loved the car when it was working though.
Maybe just anecdotal evidence, but i'm noticing a lot of Kias with no brake lights. I'm suspecting bad body control modules are going to become more of a thing as these cars age.
I noticed when GMT800 trucks were blowing DRLs constantly and lo and behold there's a TSB for that. So I don't think I'm imagining things.
Hyundai is fairly unreliable. They were up and coming back in the 2000s and to some extent the 2010s, but their reliability has been quite poor in the past 5-10 years and I really wouldn't recommend a Hyundai to anyone.
Anecdotal, but I'm extremely disappointed with my Hyundai Tucson purchase. It's the first car I've owned. The drive train is gone on it and the mechanic says it's a common issue. Only 140k on it, 2019. It's hard to believe I paid so much for it and got so little use.
140,000 miles is a lot of use in 7 years. "expected" design life of cars can be 10yrs/100,000 miles. Sorry to hear about your drivetrain issues. I don't know about the Tucson in particular, but many manufacturers are lying about the transmissions having "lifetime" fluid when the transmission manufacturers themselves recommend fluid changes around 60-80k. But if you don't change it, yes technically the car will make it to 100k, but then no shop will touch the transmission fluid for fear of wrecking it.
Believe it or not, people aren't buying Audis in China because they're thrifty.
China was a huge market for Audi in the past as luxury status symbol. However, now Chinese buyers are so enamored with new tech-heavy Chinese luxury cars that Audi had to go make a whole sub-brand specific to the Chinese market just to stay in the game[1].
Its interesting that TV is regulated. You can't put certain content on there and I'm sure the governments can ultimately control things. Now todays eyeballs are controlled by Meta and TikTok and I dont really trust them at all - they have too much unchecked power.
> I'm sure the governments can ultimately control things
In the US there is free speech protecting the ability of people to say what they want.
Public TV has limitations on broadcast of certain material like pornography, obviously, but the government can’t come in and “control” the opinions of journalists and newscasters.
The current US admin has tried to put pressure on broadcasters it disagrees with and it’s definitely not a good thing.
You really do not want to encourage governments to “control” what topics cannot be discussed or what speech is regulated. Sooner or later the government will use that against someone you agree with for their own power.
soso, it's mostly that freely accessible channels need their content to be in a certain ~PG/age protection range (and in many countries that also changes depending on the time of the day, not sure about the US)
beyond that the constitution disallows any further regulation of actual content
through that doesn't mean that they can't apply subtle pressure indirectly.
Is that legal? no.
Anyway done for years? yes.
But mostly subtle not forced, i.e. let's say you give "suggestions" not required changes.
Except in recent years it has become a lot less subtle and much more forced. Not just giving non binding "suggestions" but also harass media outlets in other seemingly unrelated ways if they don't follow your "suggestions".
PS: Like seriously it often looks like the US doesn't really understand what free speech is about (as in some of the more important points are freedom of journalism, teaching and also showing your opinions through demonstrations and similar.). And why many historians find it good but suboptimal and why e.g. the approach to free speech was revisited when drafting the west German constitution instead of just more or less copying the US constitution (the US but also France, UK had some say in the drafting of it, it was originally meant to be temporary until reunification, but in the end was mostly kept verbatim during unification as it worked out quite well).
This is not the problem. The problem is that everyone moves to solar for most of the year not using or paying for the infrastructure, then in cold winter nights everyone expects the grid to be able to supply as normal.
Just did a funding round. In a sign of the times clickhouse used to be an interesting DB product, but is now a "database software that companies can use as they develop AI agents "
<i>Database technology startup ClickHouse Inc. has raised $400 million in a new funding round that values the company at $15 billion — more than double its valuation less than a year ago. </i>
Investors are finicky creatures, if you've been relying on VC-funding since before, it's hard to stop until you are really successful, and if everyone starts to only look at shiny AI stuff and you still need investors, you end up with not much choice.
I wish there was less of it, we'd have better software then, but :/
Yeah, like FOSS which is drastically underfunded since birth, yet continues to put out software that the entire world ends up relying on, instead of relying on whatever VC-pumped companies are putting out.
I'm not talking "better software" as in "made a lot of money", I meant "better" as in "had a better impact on the world".
FOSS software that many rely on that has been around for a while were non-VC: VCS, Linux / GNU / BSD, web browsers, various programming languages, various databases...
Many of your examples came from people who were funded by Universities in the 80s, which was basically the VC of the time. And in the 90s, a lot of the core committers of those projects were already working at VC funded companies.
Back then it was very normal to get VC funding and then hire the core committers of your most important open source software and pay them to keep working on it. I worked at Sendmail in the 90s and we had Sendmail committers (obviously) but also BSD core devs and linux core devs on staff. We also had IETF members on staff.
> FOSS software that many rely on that has been around for a while were non-VC: VCS, Linux / GNU / BSD, web browsers, various programming languages, various databases...
It's honestly hard to pick a pattern out for older open source project contributions. PostgreSQL started at UC Berkeley but people contributed to it from all over. Key engineers like Tom Lane worked a number of companies in the database field, some dependent on VC funding, some not. He's currently at Snowflake. [0] A lot of recent innovation around PostgreSQL today (Neon, Supabase, etc.) is VC funded.
That pattern changed with projects like Hadoop, which was about the time that VC funds recognized a standard playbook around monetizing open source. [1]
Sure, those projects were un(der)funded in the 80s and 90s but the reason we talk about them today is because of the huge amount of investment - both direct and in kind - that VC backed companies have managed to give to many of them.
I think it’s easy to forget how long ago it was when FOSS truly was the outsider and wouldn’t be touched by most companies.
Mozilla/Firefox started in 1998 and then started taking ad revenue from Google in 2005, which pays for a large chunk of its development. It’s been part of the Silicon Valley money machine for 20 years, most of its existence.
I don’t know why you are being downvoted. I mean, I guess I do, but sheesh, they are really shooting the messenger here. Maybe they are looking for more nuance: a lot of software is/was written by people working at…
I don’t think everything VCs touch is gold, but it’s also not the case that they are pure evil either. It’s almost as if you can’t claim they are all good or all bad.
I sometimes wonder if the VC ecosystem creates its own confirmation bias by making it easy to see and aggregate companies it incubates. Whenever I look for jobs, I'm always surprised to find companies that have taken no VC funding and don't try particularly hard to market to the industry as a whole, preferring instead to stay relatively under the radar.
They tend to have more grounded financials (read: paths to profitability) and while the pay packages aren't quite aligned with the top end of the market, they also tend to manage headcount more responsibly than FAANG. I work with a fairly niche stack and I'm constantly finding new companies that I've never heard of and don't raise VC rounds.
Long way of saying that just because they're not easy to find doesn't mean they don't exist.
What but? If this is the "best" that VC can do with the money, the US government should simply tax it away from them. Absolutely worse way to allocate resources and develop a robust forward looking tech industry, you're just chasing the shiny while fucking over the commons.
The fundraising market is very interesting right now. You have to have some AI and agenr narrative without which you do not look very forward looking. You might be a database company with million in revenue but if you do not have a AI narrative you would not be perceived as forward looking as compared to a startup thats burning through millions in token with no path to profitability. It has become table stakes and the new reality for startups.
I think it’s hard to make money as a pure play DB vendor and has been for a decade or two. So they all inevitably pivot into some service specific to whatever the hot use case of the moment is… Cybersecurity. Observability. Crypto. AI.
Get started a corporate surplus mini pc on ebay. They super cheap - search for micro pc - if you get a recent CPU from Dell or Lenovo should be under $200, you can install Fedora or other Linux distribution. Ask Claude for everything else.
That's twice what I'd spend on a first server when you're still figuring out what you need!
My first "server" was a 65€ second-hand laptop including shipping iirc, in ~2010 euros so say maybe 100€ now when taking inflation into account. I used that for a number of years and had a good idea of what I wanted from my next setup (which wasn't much heavier, but a little newer cpu wasn't amiss after 3 years). Don't think one needs to even go so far as 200$ for a "local Bandcamp archive" (static file storage) and serving that via some streaming webserver
Jellyfin docs do mention "Not having a GPU is NOT recommended for Jellyfin, as video transcoding on the CPU is very performance demanding" but that's for on-the-fly video transcoding. If you transcode your videos to the desired format(s) upon import, or don't have any videos at all yet as in GP's case, it doesn't matter if the hardware is 20x slower. Worst case, you just watch that movie in source material quality: on a LAN you won't have network speed bottlenecks anyway, and transcoding on GPU is much more expensive (purchase + ongoing power costs) than the gigabit ethernet that you can already find by default on every laptop and router
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