dm8

Talent and ability to create next gen of multimodal models.

This was so random. There are only two reasons for shutdowns in fintech. 1 - you run out of money. 2. some sort of regulatory/underwriting/compliance issues. I hope its former.

Meta needed consumer product along with foundational model. Manus gives them consumer product now. Pure speculation - must be 5B+ acquisition given their revenue run rate.

It seems M&A door is wide open for 2026.

Communication, Trade, Commerce, Navigation, Education/Learning, are timeless needs for 100s of years. We buy and sell products all the time. And if something that improves our day to day shopping experience then we are solving for one of the core needs for us as humans.

I have worked on 3D shopping - this seems like a huge step up from the world of photogrammetry to NeRFs to veo. When it comes to shopping - the realism matteres the most. Its not just about 3D model but shadows of light, texture, how it looks in different settings (for e.g. if it's furniture item in a larger scene). That's where the rubber meets the road. Regardless, I'd be curious - how fast can we create 3D models from existing imagery/videos.

This is incredible. I wonder if there will be medicine that cures idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. New class of drugs like Ofev stop worsening of the IPF but doesn't cure it.

As someone who likes to pay for things I use, I'm in the target customer/user group here. Couple of questions -

1. Is it only for FB or across all Meta services (FB, IG, WhatsApp, Oculus etc.) 2. Are ads going to be shown to verified/premium subscribers?

2nd point is particularly important. Especially if key value prop is about security and privacy. Looks like ARPU for Meta is $40 annually. So financially they can afford not to show ads to verified subscribers (annual sub of $100+). However, for verified subscribers it's only about "blue badge" I doubt there will be huge uptick unless it has other "sweetners" like "no ads" like youtube premium.

Overall - this is a great move by Meta. As it gives them ability to diversify revenue streams from ads where they are dependent on 3rd party platform privacy policies. YouTube premium has shown that social platforms can thrive with freemium model and they have roughly 80M subs ($1B+ revenue). Meta is trying to replicate same success with their brands.

Blade Runner is one of those movies that gets better every time you watch. First time I watched it, I was thoroughly bored. But over the years I seem to appreciate the deeper meaning under it. It tries to present some fundamental questions - "what separates humans from robot/AI?, Is it the act of humans giving birth to other humans or feelings or deeds?, Is robot/AI superior to human or vice a versa?"

For those who find this movie boring, I'd recommend reading the book - "Do Androids dream of electric sheep" and maybe then watch the movie.

I was born after it was released yet I find it's imagery unique even now. Every frame feels like an elaborate painting/artwork. I can imagine how innovative might've been when it was first released in early eighties.

Awesome. I'm not a golfer but I love this. Keep improving.

Absolutely insane. They are growing faster (at their scale) than most SV hot shot startups!

Edit: iPhone sales wow! Is it the most successful product ever?

0 overdraft fees. Yay. More like it. It will force major banks to rethink their overdraft fees as a revenue center. As someone who was not so well financially just a decade ago, overdraft fees seemed like penalty for being poor. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, you never know when your account will get overdrawn. And most evil thing was - bank will deny the charge because you didn’t have enough funds but will still charge you for $34 fee.

Some banks offer overdraft protection but it’s not obvious in lot of banking websites/apps in my experience and has been recent development. Plus - lot of people don’t understand the concept of overdrafts. They assume bank will deny if your account doesn’t have enough funds.

I’m surprised congress didn’t take action on overdraft fees as it mostly affects middle class and poor people.

> That combined with the ridiculous housing costs in the bay area makes me wonder why anyone (especially more numerate people) would tolerate not working remotely.

Maybe some people genuinely like living in the bay area. It is a beautiful place.

I maybe in the minority in this comments section but I genuinely enjoy working from office. I enjoy the social aspects. And commute never bothered me, albeit max commute for me was 45 mins (in the bay area). The only downside that I always felt was parking situation. Lot of my friends feel the same about office work.

I believe going forward there will be companies (and employees) in 2 camps -- remote first and hybrid/full in-office. And both types of companies will thrive. There are some people who enjoy going to office. And there are some people who enjoy working from home. And these people self select themselves for their respective jobs. And that choice is a good thing

So CRISPR/Cas9 Nobel was a given since their breakthrough papers in 2011/2012. Lot of folks were speculating whether it will win in Chemistry or Medicine. Maybe Zhang/Church will win it in Medicine in few years. Also given the revolutionary nature of this technology, there could be be more Nobel prizes in this area in coming years

Thoroughly deserved. 9 years since publishing their paper in Nature. CRISPR/Cas9 is that revolutionary. Is that the fastest Nobel since breakthrough/discovery? Or was it Graphene Nobel (albeit in Physics) in 2010?

EDIT: Looks like fastest Nobel prize since discovery was in 1987 (in Physics) - for high temperature super conductivity. Bednorz and Mueller won their Nobel within 2 years (!!!!!)

Ref - https://science.sciencemag.org/content/238/4826/481

This is cool. Are you using it to power some app?

Great pictures. In one picture there is some flowchart on chalkboard. I'm always curious on how did flowchart symbols came to be. For example I'm pleasantly surprised that the disk plate/drum symbol (used to signify databases) that is drawn on chalkboard, which is prevalent nowadays is also used in 60s.

From what I have gathered, reason vests are popular in SF is due to daily weather fluctuations since they are light weight. I did not know they were popular in other cities/metros too. Especially in finance sector.

While most people are focused on how it will work for commute and day to day activities, even if it doesn't work for those use cases, it is great for theme parks, adventure rides type of use cases. People spend millions of $$ every year on those "weird" roller coaster rides and theme parks.

I have used HotelTonight several times and I loved it. In general I found cheaper deals. Now with AirBnB, it will be interesting to see if hotel chains that partner with HotelTonight continue working as there is no love lost between Airbnb and hoteling industry. I guess Airbnb will try to make HT as an hybrid app of hotels and Airbnb bookings.

I'm not sure if I can answer that as I don't know their rating system. However, I'm confident of the fact that if they have inspectors who have expertise in Indian food then there will be dozens of restaurants from different Indian cities alone. Every part of India has unique food offerings and diversity. Street food alone has so much to offer in India. Now ever popular dishes (across the globe) like Butter Chicken were invented in few restaurants in New Delhi around 70-80 years ago.

[1] Butter Chicken - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter_chicken

>> If they do not know the culinary landscape how do you imagine they will issue a rating? Doing so would destroy their credibility as a knowledgeable school of critics.

By hiring more inspectors?

I'm not saying there is cultural bias or something like that. I'm just pointing out the fact that they have certain cuisines that are not represented.

If you consistently claim to be - "the world’s best known independent restaurant and hotel guide" with proudly boasting 100 odd year history, then you better show gastronomic variety. Else it just seems weird.

[1] From their twitter handle description - twitter.com/MichelinGuideUK

One my gripes with "michelin star" system is that it is heavily tilted towards European and Japanese food. There is absolutely no Indian, South American, Mediterranean, Thai, or Chinese restaurants (albeit few though) in it's catalog. They are pretty much missing the diverse and exceptional gastronomical experience in doing so.

EDIT: Small change, looks like there are few Chinese restaurants!

I co-founded a startup, and lot of my friends work at or run startups. At the end of the day everyone realizes, AWS/GCP/Azure etc. are all infrastructure players. It is given that all big 3 cloud providers will be competing against you in one way or other. And infrastructure becomes a cost center once you start growing. So doesn't matter whether you are competing against them or not. Even Apple uses GCP. At certain scale, the costs questions starts popping up a lot.

>> If Amazon comes in and crushes Uber, will any startup trying to make it big want to use AWS?

Heck yeah! And startups are not the bread and butter of AWS. They are trying to go upstream with enterprise and government contracts that are multi million $$.

> - Amazon makes no money, except through AWS. Purchasing Lyft is a significant investment over a a long time, and the money has to come from somewhere. If AWS lags during this critical juncture, this could cripple Amazon hugely.

Did you forget Prime? Then there is Amazon Media Group, A9 etc.

In fact with PrimeNow and AmazonFresh, AMZN gets the readymade footprint of last mile delivery network. Not to mention same network can be utilized for last mile delivery of urgent/priory shipments via Prime/AMZN.

> - And Amazon has no giant cash pile sitting around like Apple. It cannot afford to cannibalize customer trust in AWS when it is imperative to their survival. See: their stock dropping, partly because their growth slowed slightly, and partly because it seems Azure's growth is faster.

Eh, it's just one customer that gets lost due to this (albeit big one). And I doubt Uber is sticking around AWS because of AWS brand, in fact most likely they are sticking around due to combination of tech debt and cheaper deal that they are getting. Why can't they move to GCP (ala Spotify) or Azure if they get better deal there?

More tangential q. I always wonder - why Epic is not disrupted yet? In same vein similar Q can be asked, why Bloomberg is not disrupted yet?

I guess software is inherently monopolistic (or oligopolistic) market especially in highly regulated markets (healthcare, finance etc.).

So going back to earlier question -- why can't someone start an open source alternative? And may be sell it something along the lines of Redhat business model. It looks like support (training, maintenance) costs are way more in healthcare. Why can't be Epic disrupted?

P.S. One of my physicians uses Epic, and he is pretty old guy. And once he showed me the interface, my first reaction, "oh god, that software is designed by committee". I really sympathize with doctors who have to work several hours everyday to work on Epic.

That was a great read. I really admire people having passion as well as expertise in these unique fields. Once fortune 500 CEO had come to my school for talk and he told us shortest path to rise up in corporate ladder is either having expertise in somewhat niche but valuable field or starting your own successful company or having great amount of luck (which he said most C level folks don't say out publicly)

I didn't see different poster for same movie although I'm not a caucasian. Maybe it's just not your ethnicity but also your previous viewing habits. For example, if you watched lot of movies with hispanic or Indian or african-american actors then you might get those posters to incentivize you to watch more.

I'm pretty sure they have exhaustive feature set (not just demographic information) in their model to select the cover poster for user.

> How can an advertisement not be bad? Ultimately it's always the goal to get someone to buy something they otherwise wouldn't.

Brand/product awareness. Sometimes you don't know what you want. And sometimes you don't know if certain product/solution exists for the problem you are facing. Believe it or not, one of my favorite apps is MyFitnessPal, I downloaded it via an ad because I was looking was health/fitness category product but never heard of MFP (few years ago before they were popular). I thought I will give it a shot and downloaded and solved my problems plus I discovered few more use cases for my health/fitness related interests.

Another example (rather misconception), "Google became famous via word of mouth". No, Google had prominent ad placement (aka powered by Google which was part of their contract) as a part of their deal with providing search on AOL/Yahoo portals. When non-tech savvy users searched on these portals they were exposed to Google and were exposed to much more superior search engine than that was available.

Absolutely and you have your preferences. The "pull" model advertising tend to be extremely expensive. For example, search advertising in search engines. That is known as intent driven ads, where user is clearly mentioning their intent.

"Push" advertising can work great as long as user is not bombarded with too many ads. Also, ad creative copy needs to be exceptional to make it work. In real work, a good example of "push" advertising model is billboard advertising or print advertising in magazines. Most people don't mind Apple ads on billboards (where they spend lot of $$) because they are done really well. Unfortunately, in push model on digital advertising is not always great due to poor quality of creatives or flashy/obstructive ads that distract users.

Instagram does advertising surprisingly well but that's may by my opinion since I have seen lot of bad stuff in ad-tech. My GF works in textiles/product design world but loves ads on Instagram since she follows certain type of accounts related to work and she gets very context driven ads, which she loves. Similar to ads that you get in high end fashion magazine. Believe it or not lot of people buy magazines like Vogue for their advertising too. You can always mute ads from accounts that you don't find relevant.

Some apps/companies are going towards providing ad free option (like Spotify) for users who don't want ads at all, I think that will get more and more traction in coming years..