deepGem

Looks very cool.

Can you possibly make the dangling part swappable so that you have amazing combinations of mix and match possibilities. Somewhat like the Apple Watch.

All day wearing comfort is another factor I'd focus on.

This opens up a whole new market - you could go bananas with the materials and options. Gold, precious stones and what not. Kudos !

Suddenly my magnetic knife rack can serve as an iPhone stand :)

I get the hating. By that argument, even private jets are an abomination and so is the lifestyle of almost every billionaire out there. It is no surprise that the top 1% account for all of the pollution of the bottom 50% of the population.

Depending on your perspective, every expenditure and experience that money can buy, can be viewed as wasteful and harming the environment. For someone with no access to water, a long shower feels very wasteful.

If we don't actively come out of this dogma and not embark on some ground breaking technology, our lives won't change at all. So many new technologies from aircraft and space technology have made it to mainstream - Kevlar, carbon fiber to think of a couple. So, even if Boom ends up building only billionaire's toye, there is a possibility that second and third order inventions can make it to mainstream society and bring about change at scale.

Having shadowed some great sales execs in my earlier career and having done some enterprise sales as a startup founder here are my pointers to get started and what perhaps matters the most. I'll address what matters most first:

1. The ability to take a NO without getting burnt out. Try to keep the emotion out of a sale as much as possible, even though it's your company and product. 2. The ability to have a sense of humour and make conversations enjoyable. No one wants to talk to a sales guy who is boring. 3. The ability to understand when have you earned the trust of your customer. Essentially your customer has to be comfortable talking to you and one of the best signals for earning positive trust is how much your customer makes casual funny comments or small talk. 4. Once you've earned your customer's trust - a sale is more or less guaranteed. Once you've learned how to earn trust - I mean once you've cracked that algorithm it's rinse and repeat.

To get started: 1. Make random conversations with people of your customer's persona either at events, through cold calling or cold emailing and be very very sensitive to the pulse of people you talk to. Do they engage in conversation, are the conversations ending with one words rather than continuations. 2. Have a very precise pitch of what you are selling. Pitch the customer once they are relatively in their comfort zone. 3. You won't be able to sell to busy execs SVPs and above - no matter how good you think you are. So it's better to reach out to someone in the lower rungs of the ladder. 4. If you play golf or some sport where decision makers hangout it'll certainly help to make conversation. 5. Sales is typically a male dominated field unfortunately. So you have to be conversant in sports/politics of that region to make some headway.

To summarise, sales is all about making conversations and earning someone's trust. It has very little to do with 'what' you are selling.

I feel the same but in the end Erik does mention that the will follow up with more actionable items on how to build a personal moat. So this is more like an intro post.

Somehow, there is very little importance given to values in all these posts. What really matters in the world ultimately is what you value, your integrity for example. That's something you can't earn overnight, and for sure compounds like crazy over time. Integrity is also not a standalone unit of growth. It is a function of hard work, discipline and sheer will power. It takes a lot of guts to not veer off into the grey areas or to not stick to your words.

So, IMO, while skills based moats are extremely valuable - like for all the examples cited, character/quality based moats shouldn't be overlooked. Perhaps they go hand in hand.

As someone who has mostly written early stage software with 1 to 3 developers, the single most reason to skip tests is the rapidly changing APIs. Also it is ok to ship somewhat buggy code. Use case validation and speed trumps accuracy.

Also invariably a lot of early stage code is in the front end and FE testing is very time consuming.

What has been immensely helpful is an automated build and deploy system, which quite honestly is very expensive to build in the iOS world. I just want a one click deploy to a clean machine every time I decide to deploy. This is kinda trivial in the backend world using containers but not so in the iOS world.

Theft is a major issue and all anti-theft measures will result in increased cost. One possible option is for the battery manufacturers to make the stolen batteries useless by short circuiting them or something like that. So there is total deterrence against theft.

totally, not debating that battery swap won't work for cars in the future but as of now, it probably won't.

Also, the changing business model resulting from the battery and the vehicle separation will most certainly lead to innovation in batteries. So cars can innovate on motors while battery makers can innovate on batteries and who knows a third market might emerge for those battery swapping robots.

It'll be interesting to watch out how this will plays out - Tesla as the all integrated electric vehicle (Apple) v/s the rest of the industry which might go the independent vehicle/battery/swap robot (wintel) route.

Better place, An Israeli startup tried electric cars with battery swapping and failed miserably.

So, decoupling battery from the car and allowing better competition in the battery space might fly. Car makers need not be bothered by the battery tech and can just focus on making good electric motors, since most of the car parts are from other vendors anyways.

However, the decoupling might not be all that rosy as Musk has demonstrated that safety is best achieved with total vertical integration. Even Tesla tried battery swapping but gave up.

This might work really well in 2 wheelers though. The existing bike manufacturers won't have to retool their factories by much to replace the engine with a motor and the batteries can be probably swapped in and out of the under seat space or something like that.

Here are some data points from March. https://towardsdatascience.com/whats-happened-to-the-data-sc...

Agreed, I don't imply that developers should talk to customers but they should at least work with support team in a more cohesive manner.

I have seen the flip side also where the developers are very accessible, support pushes every minor issue over to engineering. This is like super rare though.

Precisely. I get that a large portion of the population just wants to pick up the phone and call but that can be totally avoided with so many messaging outlets today.

On the one extreme you can offer voice based support - Just blurt out your question to the phone, system does speech -> text and answers your question. Super super hard.

Interim at least you can offer support on Whatsapp/Facebook where someone can actually ask a question and get answered - a much better version of the chat bots that exist today.

I work closely with support teams and it's one of the toughest jobs in tech. I say toughest because it is stressful and the payoff for that stress isn't that high.

I still don't understand why companies treat support as a second class function to engineering. Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way. I also find that support teams operate mostly on linear growth, meaning it is still a human scale problem. I don't see technology in the IVR/ticketing space innovating at the same rate as other areas.

IMO, the best alleviation for support is to avoid that customer call in the first place. Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call. It's a super hard problem to solve.

Needs something like StackOverflow for every problem domain, delivered over voice.

"Our business benefits from powerful network effects. The Data Cloud will continue to grow as organizations move their siloed data from cloud-based repositories and on-premises data centers to the Data Cloud. The more customers adopt our platform, the more data can be exchanged with other Snowflake customers, partners, and data providers, enhancing the value of our platform for all users. We believe this network effect will help us drive our vision of the Data Cloud."

I fail to understand this network effect. Is there any conflation here ? How does data sharing equate to network effect. Something is fundamentally not adding up here. If I share my data with 10 other customers, it should inherently enhance my experience. How does this happen with Snowflake ?

Totally unrelated but my current favorite breakfast is a peanut butter banana milkshake. < 2 mins prep, well balanced and doesn't ruin your tastebuds. Add some protein powder if needed. The bestest breakfast on earth.

"except they dictate every aspect of the transaction" - I think they do it out of necessity, here in India at least.

Ferrying passengers is a very risky business. So protect the passengers, Uber/Lyft have no other option but to kind of police every aspect of the driver - passenger transaction. Despite all that, there were multiple rapes of women in Uber/Ola cars in India, drivers were ghosting Uber/Ola, they have tried to outsmart the routing algorithms by crowding in hot zones, tried to take cash from passengers without running the trip and what not.

While I espouse for drivers being treated fairly, whether as employees or contractors it's not that simple to bring in protections for the drivers without monitoring/scrutiny.

The contractors/employees of McDonalds are in a very different setting, and their customers are almost at no risk and there is little to no scope for embezzling cash, short of robbing the joint. So the comparison doesn't really hold true.

Well, the advantage I see with humanoid hands is that the same task that a human does can be done much faster by a humanoid hand. For instance chopping onions or other vegetables. Even dishwashing.

Can I surmise that most automation in dishwashing etc is geared for commercial enterprises ? I find the same lacking in a household. Sure you have the traditional dishwashers and vegetable choppers but they are largely clumsy to use and still take quite a lot of effort.

For a consumer, I don't know if the equation 'human labor cost << robots' holds true. It is a hassle to get human labor and there is no scope for time arbitrage. A robot can do the dishwashing job at night for example. Unlike a traditional dishwasher, you don't have to load the utensils. Just leave the utensils in a sink and you are done.

"The real problem: solve any of these problems, make very little money" - Just curious why have you come to this conclusion ?

Object manipulation has potential products in dishwashing and vegetable chopping - sufficiently large markets, potential billion $ outcomes for a startup which takes the early mover lead. Two robotic hands that can work in co-ordination just as human hands do. Extremely difficult to solve, but money is there.

of course. Also, much of the progress at least in computer vision is attributable to competitions such as Imagenet challenge. It's not my intent to downplay the importance of research or the competitions.

From what I understand, after reading through Musk's biography, he is not a typical 'research' oriented person. A typical researcher is focused on refining a body of work that is already at the precipice of cutting edge. This research first mindset is about pushing the boundaries of research and the most efficient way to do that is by publishing papers etc.

Musk, on the other hand is a problem first person and uses research to solve those problems. It's very different from a researchers mindset. For ex, Tesla's self driving car unit is full of researchers but they are not doing the traditional research, i.e pushing the boundaries of machine learning/computer vision. They are not there to win a research competition - ones that gave rise to Resnet etc. They are very focused on using deep learning to solve the problems of self driving.

The end goal for Musk is a product and research is a means of getting there, the end goal for a researcher is .. well research.

Am quite surprised and quite honestly shocked that it took this long for US or any country to recognize this fact.

It's not just a fair playing field war between US and China, but between China and rest of the world. Even India, whose companies are not allowed to operate in China under fair play rules banned TikTok only after the Chinese incursion across the LOC.

I really don't know what to make of this.

Termial: ctrl + L also clears the screen

From the post "The key, he says, is using the right transaction identifiers so that calls can be traced across components, services, and queues".

I think this is a key feature not many people implement especially in today's world of over blown micro services, having a transaction id from the time the request hits the reverse-proxy till the database write is so helpful in debugging, saves a ton of time.

In the deep learning world every major framework works on top of Cudnn which works on top of CUDA Pytorch, Tensorflow you name it.

https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/10657

That is the state of Pytorch support for AMD GPUs.

Not happening. nVidia has a stranglehold on deep learning because of CUDA and Cudnn. I don't see any AMD alternatives to take over either of these. So I wouldn't bet too much on AMD taking over the deep learning chip market.

I think someone's ability to understand and explain recursion like am a child is very undervalued. It's not about testing whether you know the base case or the fact that you write less lines of code in recursion but the fact that there is a built-in stack for you to use without creating one.

What are the practical applications of recursion though ? Other than sorting and DFS ( well even DFS can be done iteratively with stacks ). I'll be curious to know.

I find testing for HashTable/HashMap knowledge to be far more practical than testing for LinkedLists simply because you can't escape HashTables in today's world.

Yep, in addition to increasing corporate taxes to 28%, Biden's plan is to ensure that corporations will pay at least a minimum tax, regardless of all the deductions they can avail.

https://in.news.yahoo.com/joe-bidens-tax-plan-may-wallop-the...

The tide might lose steam if Biden wins the election. Though I doubt there will be any carnage similar to the dot com bust. For one, interest rates are super low and I don't see them rising anytime soon, even if the Fed raises rates, the ceiling will be around 3-4%.

The Covid induced tech euphoria might die down but I am willing to wager that won't be the case. People's habits once changed are very hard to fall back, especially when the new habits have a net positive economic impact. Time saved in commuting, air travel etc. The events industry might totally die down though. So there will be some negative impact as well. Other than these specific verticals such as events and tourism, I bet the market will favour tech innovations now more than ever.

So yeah, this is probably the right time for any tech company to go public, not just those with mediocre metrics.

"The most acute issue with this vulnerability is Apple’s universal clipboard functionality, which means that anything I copy on my Mac or iPad can be read by my iPhone, and vice versa. So, if TikTok is active on your phone while you work, the app can basically read anything and everything you copy on another device: Passwords, work documents, sensitive emails, financial information. Anything."

Ok, with such a vulnerability, I wonder how Apple has let all these apps snoop on clipboard data for so long. They go after Hey like right away, and they have let such a gaping security hole slide through for such a long time.