Spot on! :)
503 karma · joined September 30, 2010
Surviving these last three years was, well, as hard as you can expect. Raising money was a challenge (hardware, in Europe, Central and Eastern Europe). We started scaling MFG just as the COVID started closing down China and crippling supply chains. Front row seat at the chip shortage horror show: just as we started delivering the first units of our first product, we saw our critical components go from €5 to €100 a pop, and lead times go from "shipping tomorrow" to "we may be tell you when it may be available in a few months, but not sure."
Today, we’re alive to tell the story. We expanded from headsets to pretty much every piece of tech you need in a drone; all designed and built in Europe. We do FCs, ESCs, control links, analog video links, data links (WiFi, 5G/LTE, SDR), flight computers, as well as drones, drone controllers, etc. We have a drone sim with 500k total downloads. We also do our own private mobile networking infra (5gc/epc RAN, gNB/eNB). We do HW, FW, and "normal" SW.
We’ve pretty much consistently doubled our revenues every year since inception, but it’s been a wild ride. While our US counterparts were raising tens of millions with similar traction and a fraction of tech collateral, we never got much love from VCs. Raising is still a bitch.
Last five years were blood, sweat, and tears, but I’d do it all over again, cause building physical stuff is the best job in the world.
For all great things that the Age of Internet brought to the humanity, detrimental effects of social media (and other non-traditional information sources) on our democracies is evident.
Counter-intuitively, the democratisation of the mechanisms for dissemination of information ultimately led to weakening of institutions that consist the pillars of our democratic societies. My take is that this was largely through the dilution of authority brought about by the cambrian explosion of sources of “information” (more accurately: sources of content).
Symptoms of this include various manifestations of populism, which are typically fueled or at least helped by a mix of establishment-challenging conspiracy theories (including the harmful challenges to well-established scientific conclusions based on objective and impartial process of reasoning).
If the generative AI will drive us to assuming everything we see online is fake, this would take us back to a state where track record in informational integrity would grow authority of individual information sources, and reverse the effects of authority dilution.
If that happens, it will be a full circle, driven by successive technological advancements.
As a personal rule, I tip by default: in a cafe I will round up the bill amount; in a restaurant I will do up to 10%. I will withold the tip for a sub-par service.
Most of people I know would do the same.
“If we think of sexual satisfaction as the snare or bait laid to draw humans into this tangle of impossible desires, then who or what might have laid that snare?”
the GPT avoids using any religious devices in the interpretation.
I thought it is obvious that Poet’s intention was to imply it is the Devil that laid the bait.
I am a complete ingorant when it comes to Shakespeare’s opus. Was he so deeply devoid of religious beliefs that he shunned any religious interpretations in his work?
A few months in, and it already has a potential to massively (2x, 3x) increase the efficiency for certain types of developer jobs.
If a good developers teamed with a capable AI engine can do their work plus the work of a few juniors, that’s got to reduce the demand for the equivalent amount of that particular human work in the long run.
Basel III was introduced to force banks to be more conservative, and thus more safe. Downside: this also means bank is going to be less profitable.
European banks were forced to implement Basel III, while the US bankers managed to lobby a loophole for certain types of banks. And sure enough, SVB leveraged this loophole.
For those interested, FT Alphaville describes this in ample detail:
Silicon Valley Bank is a very American mess https://on.ft.com/3ywMURD
So, in my view, this whole business of Ukraine’s NATO membership was a head fake from the beginning, intended primarily to bait Russia into a war they could never win. A bait they idiotically jumped on.
This, of course, does not exculpate Russia from the crimes of aggression. It’s a state run by a criminal oligarchy that has almost succeeded in critically and irrevocably corrupting key western democracies (there’s clear evidence linking Russia to both Trump and Brexit, with trail of money pointing to corruption).
This war showed that Russia was more powerful and globally relevant in peace than in (conventional) war. Their global influence was much more effective through projection of soft power, various means of subversion, and deployment of limited force (like in Syria and Africa). They certainly appeared more competent.
Arguably, this clear articulation of author’s will could be viewed as an integral part of the work of art.
As much as I think that it should be subject to artistic reinterpretation (like all female cast), and that the estate is being stupidly restrictive in its legal persecution of artistic purity, I believe the opposite should be allowed too. A director should be allowed enough artistic liberty to do a play with all-male cast (as well as all-female, all-trans, all-whatever-your-pronoun-may-be).
University restricting the artistic liberty into a (forcefully diverse) mould is equally stupid as the estate suing any departure from the author’s canon.
Nevertheless, the whole situation is delightfully bizarre. Love it.
What I started doing for sharing text between Mac/iOS is a Note that serves me as a pastebin. It’s promptly and reliably synced via iCloud and it just works.