Joe8Bit

Lots of people have talked eloquantly about the monetary greed the Super League entailed, but I think it misses the wider point, Kronke (et al) have long been pushing for a _redistribution of power_ in football, away from the 'leagues' (e.g. the Premier League, La Liga, UEFA) to the clubs and owners themselves. Which is the now the canonical model for US sports, where they're most comfortable.

Another example of this is last year's "Project Big Picture"[0] in the Premier League, which was mostly led by the same owners with the same motivations.

As an illustrive example, take the NFL where Roger Goodell's purpose is to serve the leagues owners. He's an instrument of their will and so's steered the NFL in a direction that benefits them the most (e.g. Goodell will always pick the path that gets them the most money). The Premier League on the other hand takes decisions that are seen by big club owners as precisely _against_ their interests (e.g. distributing TV money from foreign TV deals equally to all clubs when they claim >80% of matches watched outside the UK are of the 5-6 big clubs, the classic but reductive 'No one in Malaysia wants to watch Bolton play')

[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/africa/54510898

Yeah, agreed. I was a Databricks skeptic when I first came across it, but it's value goes a LONG way beyond just managing Spark.

For example, we found that Databrick's Spark (or their 'Delta engine' or whatever it's called) had 50-60% better performance on our workloads than than 'core' Spark. I guess that's not surprising when a large proportion of Spark contrionutors work for you and can performance tune! Not to mention things like MLFlow and all their data engineering stuff.

This is a cool project, and I admire it's ambition, but saying it's a real 'alternative' to Databricks is a bit disingenuous.

Technically it loads all images through a Google proxy[0] which in theory prevents third parties from using images for tracking. The third parties only get a 'hit' when Google pulls the image into their cache, which is not when you open the mail.

Google can still track you, but if you really care about that then you're probably not using Gmail anyway.

[0]: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

This is a very positive change, but I'd be interested to know how the Mozilla folks think about 'collateral damage' from a policy point of view.

The exceptions and shared state lead me to believe they've thought about it and tried to mitigate it as much as possible, but how much is acceptable? If this breaks more than they thought it would, is it something they'd be comfortable rolling back or changing?

For example, if I read this post correctly, this change would put a hard upper limit in SSO logins to 30 days for Firefox users (because StorageAccess is only granted for 30 days). That might not be a _huge_ issue for most people, but it'll add a hard limit to something that's never had a browser enforced hard limit before.

Great article, but I think the conclusion about Google Maps languishing because it’s a low margin product is wrong.

While Google Maps as a distinct product has a bottom and top line I think the author underestimates the value that the underlying places data has for Google’s core search product.

The local place data is _massivley_ important to search. I don’t see any foreseeable way Google let’s the product that generates it languish. It’s far too strategic for them. Not to mention the amount of brand value maps has for them as an ecosystem.

My view is that as Google’s Maps advantage dwindles, they’ll do more and more strategic acquisitions of places data sources. Tying more data into their closed ecosystem. Whether the new tech anti-trust landscape in the US and EU allows this is another question.

Twilio wants to be an end-to-end 'customer engagement platform' so this is a super strong acquisition; in one go they've bought a huge chunk of the marketing automation eco-system, which pushes them really far up the customer value chain.

From a personal perspective it'll be interesting to see how much this pulls/pushes Twilio into the ad-tech space.

Segment's 'Customer Data Platform' really found its legs in the marketing space, but they've recently made a very big push to a 'we can do everything your DMP does and 100x more' which was making pretty big waves in the sell side of ad-tech. One of the reasons I think it's so successful is their developer experience is about a million times better than their competitors.

If Twilio does continue this push up through marketing into ad-tech I'd be very long on them eating a nice chunk of that market.

It’s a shame GitHub Actions don’t support “[skip ci]” in commit messages, as it seems be the convention similar tools have coalesced around

Reasonable or not, it's a super widespread practice for marketing and PR departments to 'insist' on certain language when their products are referred to.

A super notorious example of this is Apple insisting/asking that their devices are referred to without any determiner like 'the' or 'an' e.g. 'We think THE iPhone is really important' to 'We think iPhone is really important'

There's also a very good book by Bill Janeway (of Wargburg Pincus notoriety) on the same subject called 'Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators and the State'.

He argues the same point about the states roll in RnD (also explicitly calls out DARPA) and also their role in booms and busts.

It's easy to draw comparisons between online/digital units and outdoor, they share a lot, but the fundamental difference is that digital/online is one-to-one (one ad, one user, can be personalised) and outdoor is one to many. Right now, there's no technology available that will change that. Some people think if AR becomes ubiquitous it might, but that's still fantasyland.

Because of that, again right now, it's a misnomer that outdoor want to do the Bladerunner style microtargeting of large outdoor display (the Bugatti example you gave) simply because you make MUCH less money showing an ad to 100's of people to target one person than showing a _better_ ad to the 100's. This is because the outdoor market is still fundamentally based on CPM not CPA; that _might_ change, but in my experience it's not likely.

I did some work as a consultant for a big outdoor publisher and this has been a problem they've been attempting to solve for a decade or more.

This kind of physical, outdoor advertising has been hemorrhaging dollars to online ads for decades for several reasons but a big one is online having a much better (but far from perfect) attribution story. Attribution is the big, thorny problem in _all_ of advertising e.g. how do you know if Customer A saw Ad B and that they then went on to buy Product C.

In my experience this type of tech has two goals:

The first is measuring distribution with aggregate data about how many people saw the ad and when, then combining this with ethnographic data about the location (e.g. what proportion of people in this area fall into income bracket Y). This looks like "1,293 people have seen your ad in the last 60 minutes and here some demographic information about them". This is done with video and gait tracking, or radar/lidar for measuring volumes and people who 'engage' with the ad by lookijng at it for >N $TIME.

This is all perfectly possible and scalable and is what ClearChannel are currently doing, the product trick is to make it 'real-time' so advertisers can adjust their buys and unit distribution more flexibly when combined with digital signage (e.g. I'm going to move our ad from this unit in this location to this other unit in this other location in 'real-time' as there's more high net worth people there today). This also nicely ups outdoor spend (people use it more, it appears more sticky) but they also charge more for these more 'dynamic' outdoor units. There's a bunch of seriously dubious data the the publishers use to justify this new way of buying outdoor.

The second (and WAY worse one) is doing direct attribution (e.g. Did consumer sKIFW3890 see ad sdoflij0934r and then did they buy product 029w3r29 from merchant 203ei2-309ir). This has been the holy grail of outdoor for a decade but no one's been able to make it work. ClearChannel very clearly WANT to do it, which is creepy as all hell, but in my reading between the lines (and working in the industry a little) I don't _think_ this is what their Radar solution delivers, at the moment. I could be wrong, though.

Checkout TailwindUI[0] they have a bunch of surprisingly high quality blocks for building these types of pages. I use them all the time!

0: https://tailwindui.com

I don't think that's true, for example renewables were responsible for ~50% of the energy generated in the UK in Q1 2020[0], and Germany claims it's ~40%[1] and Sweden claims it's ~55%[2].

These aren't perfect numbers, but they clearly demonstrate renewable energy is deployable at national grid scale.

[0]: https://www.edie.net/news/10/Renewables-accounted-for-record...

[1]: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

[2]: https://sweden.se/nature/energy-use-in-sweden/

Immutability is a very powerful idea when record keeping and dealing with transactions. I know of at least one major bank whose ledgers are written Haskell.

My knowledge is from consulting for fashion companies, so am not sure where to point you I'm afraid!

Most fashion retailers work with contract factories. They design a garment (or line of garments) and then put out a tender to a set of factories in their approved supplier list. The factories then bid to manufacture those garments. The decision-making criteria for the fashion companies vary but are usually some combination of quality on offer, price and 'time to store'/turnaround time. This tender process can happen dozens or hundreds of times a year for big, high turnover fast fashion retailers. Some of these retailers do have their own factories, but most don't.

The reason these retailers need to do this is because they're always trying to stay 'on trend' and have the latest, most fashionable items at the lowest cost. They're 'chasing the zeitgeist'.

Uniqlo, on the other hand, doesn't chase fashion in the same way. They have a stable set of core garments they always sell in predictable (and VERY large) quantities. This means they can negotiate longer term, much larger scale deals with manufacturers that work out MUCH cheaper for them. It also means they can go 'up the value chain' and manufacture the fabrics and patterns and tooling themselves, reducing cost even further.

I did some strategy work for a very large UK fashion retailer who's at the complete opposite end of the "don't chase fashion" market. Everyone in that industry is trying to emulate Uniqlo's margins and unit economics.

This article talks about how they produce their fabric, but the thing they realised super early is how valuable _vertical integration_ can be in fashion retail. They own the end to end process, from raw material purchase upwards.

They can do this BECAUSE of how limited their selection is, if you're a fast fashion retailer you always needs new materials and new patterns and new tooling so it's incredibly hard to chase vertical integration and strong unit economics. They get savings by pushing that risk and RnD onto dedicated manufacturers in places like Bangladesh. It's 'just in time' manufacturing in a pretty extreme sense. Because Uniqlo have so much less cardinality in their stock they can focus and optimise for it. It also enables them to control quality in a way few others can.

In a previous life I worked in ad-tech, and I don't think it's as black and white as the OP makes it out to be. I think that's actually a Bad Thing™️ as this industry needs to profoundly change or die.

This isn't a new, unexpected thing for sell or demand side ad-tech platforms, they've seen the death of IDFA coming for a few years. The reality is that this will likely stop more 'above board' players (a good thing) but the gray area and outright malicious, scummy ad and data companies will still attempt to generate unique identifiers through things like native fingerprinting. I think Apple will also stop them incerementally, but this sadly isn't an outright victory.

I don't understand it myself, but people DO opt-in to personalised ads in pretty decent numbers, it's anecdata, but I've seen data from very large control trials (testing for exactly this scenario) where ~50% of users opt-in. The devil is in the detail with these things: what will the copy be? will alternatives be presented? how will users be able to link 'value' to what they're being asked for?

Wasn't a board member, it was a pension fund who held stock in the bank.

I was tangentially involved as a consultant when a major bank bought a few billion USD in GCP services.

Others have mentioned whole 50 person deal teams from both sides, multi year processes, all of Google’s most senior execs pressing the flesh etc.

But to your question this type of deal usually goes beyond even the C Suite, to a companies board and shareholders. The bank I was involved with held an ‘Extraordinary General Meeting’ for reps of major shareholders, to present its case and get sign-off. This part of the process was actually the longest, it took ~6 months.

That was because the shareholders of the bank had interests to be accommodated, for instance one of them was also a major holder of Amazon stock so they had a vested interest in having the bank choose AWS. They needed to be worked around or convinced choosing GCP would create more value for them than portfolio synergies.

FWIW this is also a relaitvley common practice for administrators when dealing with bankrupt companies. Donating goods they can't sell is often cheaper than storing them or paying for them to be disposed of!

Had limited experience of this while doing strategy work for a large UK fasion retailer.

A significant proportion of items from a new range had been returned as faulty. When they investigated they realised a new factory they were using for this range had slipped a huge amount of bad items through the reatilers QA process. They ended up writing down the whole line and donating it to Oxfam/Redcross to be sold in their charity shops, very similar to Goodwill. It was 100,000's of items.

They were already writing the goods down as a loss against their balance sheet and they managed to recoup a small percentage of that loss as a tax deduction for the charity donation.

It didn't happen often, but it wasn't the first time they'd done it

I really like the idea that the library doesn't try to do automatic layout, and you need to specify a nodes X/Y coords.

There are a few similar libraries where their layout algorithm is super frustarting and its implementation's so hard coupled it's really hard to change or use your own.

Most orgs at that scale build their own tooling to make working with monorepos more ergonomic, in my experience. They're based on git (or other DVCS tools like Mercurial) but they allow you to easily do things like partial clones and company specific workflow tasks like submitting patches for review or tagging in weird and arcane ways.

A small, illustrative example of this is the tooling that's built for Chrome's source code[0] with the depot_tools project [1].

[0]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...

[1]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools

The benefits of monorepos are (IME) all in people and organisation scale. For example, I've found it orders of magnitude easier to align tooling, quality, release and standards on a monorepo with 100's of 1000's of engineers working on it simultaneously.

The point you've made is a good one though, the idea of monorepos at small scale has come up a lot recently and I'm not sure the arguments for it are as compelling (I don't see many compelling arguments _against_ it either mind you). What I _have_ seen though is the pain large orgs go through going from multi-to-mono repos, I think Twitter did it recently and it was pretty painful.

Couldn't agree more.

It's really interesting to see a new generation of vertical specific, large scale CMSs emerge (like from publishing with Chorus from Vox[0] or Arc from the Washington Post[1]).

My problem with 'Enterprise CMSs' was always that they tried to sell one hammer for every single type of nail, and actually, use cases for content management are so varied (and often specific to verticals) that you buy a big generalist CMS and end up having to customise and mess about with it so much you're always left in the situation you described.

[0]: https://getchorus.voxmedia.com [1]: https://www.arcpublishing.com

£1,000+ is pretty standard for Lead/Principal level engineers, in my experience, especially in financial services where it's often even higher than that.

Pretty saturated as well, lots of FE folks looking for contracts at the moment.

Day rates of £400-1000 a day for FE devs were common before COVID, now I’d expect ~20% less than that but YMMV.

Remote and visiting occasional is getting a lot more common for contractors these days, so you could detonate it work.

The contract market in London is in a difficult place at the moment. IR35 has generally made buyers weary (in a way they weren't before) as well as limited the type of work contractors are given; budgets have also been very tightly squeezed because of Corona, it's hitting contractors pretty hard.

As a 'buyer' of these services myself, full-stack JS dev contractors are in one of the most oversaturated parts of the market and many in my network are attempting to find full-time work at the moment. Those that aren't are having to compete on rates in a way they never have before, definitely a buyers market.

The other side of this is how much more volatile contractor work is than before, many companies with a mixed full-time/contractor team see their contractor pool as the most 'expendable' when cuts need to be made. Many people in my network have had existing long-term contracts ended with little to no notice.

I've also seen limited evidence the pushing back of IR35 to next year is changing the policies towards contractors at large corporates, where (by volume) most contractors get their contracts.

In short, I don't think it's the best time, but: if you do make the jump, make sure you have contracts SIGNED before you make any big decisions. Not a hand-shake or an email, a written contract. If you can get that, then you'll be in a good place.

Definitely in demand! For example, there's a bunch of really interesting commercial work happening building or working on compiler toolchains for WebAssembly.

I did some strategy work for a global retailer a few years ago and this kept coming up, they even have a policy that SaaS tools they acquire "can't be hosted in AWS".

Their reasoning seemed a bit paranoid, but it wasn't that Amazon would secretly start mining their data there without telling them, it's that this retailer would invest 10's (even 100's) of millions of dollars in tools and infrastructure on AWS and then AWS would change their terms and conditions to allow them to look at/share data 'legally' and the retailer would be so in the hole in terms of investment/technology they couldn't leave/stop them without losing millions. They saw it as risk mitigation.

I think it's _incredibly_ unlikely this would ever happen, but if you combine that with "I don't want to give one of our biggest competitors a cent" it ends up with policies like this