benjaminwootton

I also don’t feel great after eating out for 3 meals per day. That’s the mean reason we use AirBNB.

Reminds me of his “diary of a CEO” interview where he spends half of it reading out his own inspirational emails to the team.

That’s a good idea. I’m just setting up an AirBNB and need all of the above.

I started out loving AirBNB. Then I had quite a few bad experiences and flipped back to hotels as the price equalised. In the last year or two I’ve gone back to AirBNB as the hosts seem to have professionalised and hotel prices have headed north.

Hotels.com also cancelled a brilliant loyalty programme of buy 9 nights get the 10th free which was another motivation to look elsewhere.

That’s my experience too. I’ve deployed it more than ten times as a consultant and never really understood the reputation for complexity. It “just works.”

What’s the net margin? Is anyone making money on inference yet?

When I saw the headline, I wondered why Sergey hadn't bought it for his spare change. I guess this is why.

Why do people (usually Americans) have this perception that we are an authoritarian hellscape on press freedom.

There have been a few silly stories where local police forces overreach to a social media post, but generally nobody could care less what we say.

The police won’t respond to serious crimes so you have no chance getting them to respond to something written.

There are hundreds of better things to pick on the UK for.

Doomscrolling appears to have totally replaced reading on the commute.

I’m not sure it’s that much more virtuous to read a few Dan Browns or John Grisham per year though?

The poster or the headline doesn’t say they are all fraudulent. It says the payments are nearly impossible to trace.

Many companies will throw existing employees and even founders under the bus if they think their is a few dollars to be won. To think they wouldn’t play games with ex employees is naive in the extreme.

An iPad is more portable and lighter and cheaper than a MacBook. On some days I would like to use a tablet for much of my day (between meetings, checking emails) and switch to a laptop like experience for an hour or so.

Because an ipad pro is viable as a monitor. With a phone you would need an external monitor.

Since the 13 they’ve all been so incremental. I’m left wondering what’s changed most times.

This is the first cycle I’m not upgrading. I pay for my wife and kid phones and as we all have 15s that feel brand new, I’m looking forward to a few years of “sim only” bills.

I’ve wanted this with an iPad for years. A proper mouse, higher resolution and a few UI tweaks and it replaces a laptop for most people.

I assume it’s just to stop it cannibalising other product sales.

It’s been on the up in recent years though as it appears to have won the format wars. Every vendor is rallying around it and there were new open source catalogues and support from AWS at the end of 2024.

He suggests writing for the AI so that your name is ingested into the training set. The problem is that most of the vendors don’t even give attribution, so they’ll share your idea but not your name and certainly won’t be giving you any traffic.

Interest rates are like a dial which turns economic activity up and down.

I’ve always understood that in theory but it’s the first time I’ve actually lived through it and it’s wild.

A few years of higher rates and half of the tech industry and the people who buy tech seems to be on hold.

It makes me realise how vacuous the last decade was and how a lot of our jobs and businesses existed because of dirt cheap money. I’m glad I saved some money rather than thinking it was going to last forever!

The Covid response seems to have really turned things upside down in relation to work. Inflation and cost cutting and this big readjustment in people’s values. I think apathy has ratcheted up and I don’t see how it reverts back.

The amount of engagement and passion for work feels at an all time low based on the circles I move in in the UK.

Almost everyone I know has half an eye on the exit or they are making decisions like cutting back to one person businesses or taking big pay cuts for remote. Nobody seems hungry for promotions or more money. There’s so much apathy.

I’m guessing it’s partly post Covid but feels like something is fundamentally changing in our culture. Or it could be that me and my circle are our 40s now!

I do think this trade off is real. I came off most of social media for a few years and was the happiest I’ve been in a long time. It is however a bit isolating. I stayed in touch with friends, but lots of acquaintances slipped away without an easy way to keep in touch.

This is very true and funny. I’d make a few points though:

1) It may turn out that a lot of this is necessary in order to sell B2B and keep half of the software industry going. The business on the sell side might need to reach out multiple times, engage a sales engineer, help you align all the decision makers etc otherwise it simply wouldn’t get done. Buyers are so busy and selling to a big company is so complex that some of this is just a necessary evil for B2B commerce to continue.

2) Imagine if companies were actually better at buying. They spend $millions on enterprise bloatware when startups can literally produce something 10x better at a 10th of the cost. If they were easier to sell to then we could all have nice things without this madness.

I agree that the OPs experience is soul destroying, but clients could help themselves a little and end up with more money in their pockets and better tech.

I quite like this framing. You can think of network as a medium term thing which has to be developed and worked as opposed to just getting bootstrapped.

Did you purposely leave out outbound sales? Cold emails, trade shows, working the phones?

I'm not really anti Elon, in fact I agree with a lot of what he says, but I just cannot get over that paedo comment. That said a lot about his character.

I’ve been trying to get a few trades to my house and it’s a nightmare. Nobody wants to turn up or quote, and when they do they just throw out a silly high figure. It has to already be a better option for someone who is aiming for a reasonably good salary.

I think you’d need an almighty market rally for some of these. For the first trillionaire we’d need to see Tesla double and the market would need to be going bananas for Bitcoin to 2x.

Remember 2024 has been a monster year in the markets and they just indicated they are slowing down the rate cuts.

To state the obvious, Delta is an open standards format which should be widely supported.

Databricks have also bought into Iceberg and will probably lead with that or unify the two in future.

The performance is really good. Searches and general navigation.

Everyone is throwing ideas, excuses and explanations into the mix, but maybe people just want what he’s proposing - strict border control, low regulation, small government, low taxes, free speech etc.

Im not American and barely engaged with politics at all but all of that sounds like a pretty good idea to me without looking at any stats or trying to find out why my fellow citizens were confused into making the wrong choice.

I haven’t used it much but I think the main feed is very algorithmic, so you swipe for your dopamine without paying much attention to the profile. Because of that it’s not really tied to your identity in quite the same way.

It also seems quite professionalised in that the big content producers fill the feed.

There’s also something about it being video which makes it feel harmful but in a different way than a text based platform.

I tend to think of TikTok as more of an entertainment platform rather than peer to peer social media.

I’m not the target audience though so could be wide of the mark!