4,574 karma · joined March 6, 2008
Housing is another complication that’s related to the charging situation. It’s only worthwhile to own an EV if you can charge at home. There are people who make it work with only public chargers, but it’s a major PITA. That usually means owning a home where you can install a charger. That requirement excludes a lot of people.
It’s not that everyone wants a gas guzzler. There are real challenges here.
That's why I'm saying to separate the process from the result when determining consequences. Someone who consistently exercises good judgment and who makes well-reasoned, thoughtful decisions is likely to achieve good results more often than someone who doesn't. But, event then, some things just don't work out and it impacts people's lives.
I would absolutely fire those idiots at Ford though. There's nothing wrong with trying to leverage AI. Personally, I like AI tools and I rely on them daily. But if someone lacks the judgment to figure out when a job should be performed by a human then they shouldn't be able to make decisions about how to use AI. These people are clearly out of their depth and just faking it. Clown show.
I can't speak for how these particular executives were handled. I've never worked at a place where people were quickly fired for mistakes unless it was something extreme. It's usually based on track record rather than a single thing. Most employers understand that if they fired people for making mistakes they would run out of employees very fast. On the other hand, someone who learns from a mistake probably isn't going to do it again so you may have a better employee than a hypothetical replacement. It's also generally understood that people with a large scope of responsibilities have a large blast radius when things don't work out. It just comes with the territory and it's not exclusive to the executive suite.
That said, this application of AI was profoundly stupid from the outset. You don’t necessarily fire people for a bad result from a reasonable decision making process, but you do fire them for poor judgment and reasoning. There’s nothing that can fix that except for not letting those people make decisions anymore.
Almost nobody outside of the minority of internet users fighting against chromium hegemony cares about Firefox. Firefox lost its casual users years ago. Hell, even most of those people sticking with it out of principle are doing it while gritting their teeth. It's been a subpar browser for a long time and the Mozilla organization kinda sucks.
Why would any for-profit enterprise waste their time or money on Firefox?
Here’s a perfect example. Square recently rolled out “managerbot”. I was like “oh, cool” because I actually wanted something like that. I asked it a few questions about the data in my system, most of which it couldn’t answer. On top of that, it was as slow as molasses. I could pull the report and get the information myself faster than that bot could do anything. Square isn’t the only one. Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, etc. They are all guilty of it.
Personally, I like using AI tools, but I’m experiencing the marketing fatigue too. Developers are putting it into everything, doing it badly and then pitching it as a central feature.
I guess it’s the natural cycle of things though. We are somewhere around the peak hype -> disillusionment part of the cycle.
I would hypothesize that there's a lot more customer churn at the lower price points than there is in the higher tiers and when you get into dedicated servers. You're dealing with people who spin up a cheap VPS, mess around with it for a while and then delete it. Or maybe the kinds of customers whose payment card expires and they don't bother to update it because they're not using that $7 VPS for that little pet project they forgot about. Payments fail and then the VPS runs for a few more weeks before they finally have to delete it due to non-payment.
Higher prices filter out the unserious people who are a higher risk for churn. What they're left with is bigger customers with bigger footprints who lock in long term rates.
Of course, this is pure speculation on my part.
It wasn’t because Mozilla stopped using GP’s favorite chat software. It’s because GP was a believer in the mission and the principles. Switching from an open system to a corny corporate one made the whole illusion fall apart. Mozilla was a corp all along and they took their volunteers for a ride.
There's never going to be a situation where a heavy Google Assistant user switches over to Apple for Siri. Anyone who would have switched from Apple to Google for their assistant likely would have done so by now. Siri just isn't a very important feature. It doesn't bring people to Apple's platform nor does it steer them away. It might bother users that it sucks, but it doesn't bother anyone enough that it hurts Apple's bottom line. Frankly, continuing to pour money into that bottomless pit does more damage. I wonder why they do it.
Flatpak serves a need, there are plenty of users who like it and there are probably even more who just use it without thinking much about it. Personally, I like it for a few reasons: - Being able to install something dependency-heavy with just one package - Sandboxing - Getting a newer package than what my distro provides - Being able to update apps independently of the rest of the OS - Being able to easily install apps that my distro doesn't provide
The people who hate it, especially without giving a reason, are largely irrelevant when flatpak is filling a need for so many other people. Design for the people who are using and who like your product. Make adjustments based on their feedback. Ignore the people who just make noise.
It took between $150k and $200k to start up. We had to demolish and rebuild an existing retail space. We also spent a lot on our equipment. You can definitely do it for less.
We picked a location near our house because we were tired of leaving our city to get good coffee. It's in a fairly busy shopping center with a supermarket.
We did the best we could with our business plan. It was wrong though - both good and bad.
We were pretty much cash flow positive by the second or third month. There were a few occasions where we had to put in a little extra cash during the first several months though. We were maybe 7 months in the last time we did. We turned a profit our second year. It's not easy though. You struggle to survive for at least 12-18 months.
We started with 3 employees. We still have 2 of them and the other went off to college. We have more now, but it's mostly part timers with the original 2 picking up most of the hours. We extended our hours since we first opened and we were open 360 days last year.
We selected our beans like idiots because we didn't know any better, but it turned out to be awesome. Normal people hook up with a local roaster. We went to Costa Rica to meet farmers. We visited a bunch of places and ended up with a direct trade agreement. We started importing green coffee in bulk and roasting it locally in small batches.
For marketing, we make silly social media videos and run ads on Google and Meta. We also did some local news stuff in the beginning. We do the typical local SEO stuff, get great reviews, etc. We are the highest rated shop in the area so a lot of people find us that way. We do some influencer marketing - a lot of bang for your buck there. We also offer a great loyalty program - nearly 60% of our revenue goes through that.
We have SMS opt-in from thousands of customers so it's easy to blast out a quick promo and shake the money tree on a slow day. Offering double points can turn things around quickly.
A surprising number of people will provide an email address or phone number on their first visit. I'll keep track of those first timers and load them into a retargeting campaign on Meta if they go a few weeks without coming back. I spent $16 doing that this month and got $940 in revenue from those customers.
Ultimately, the most important thing is to make sure everyone leaves happy. We work hard so that people leave happier than when they came in. Mistakes are made too. When you're making a couple hundred drinks a day and doing food orders, you're bound to screw something up. All our employees have the authority to give discounts, refunds or comp items. They keep an eye on people when they get their order. If it looks like they don't like it, our staff will be proactive about it. It was hard in the beginning when we were scraping by and giving away a drink because somebody didn't like what they ordered, but it pays off in the long run. You must have solid repeat customers to stay in business.
You can usually find a local roaster who will help show you the ropes. Often, they are the local channel partners you go through to buy your espresso equipment anyway. If you call up La Marzocco, Sanremo or Simonelli, they will put you in touch with some people. Local chamber of commerce meetings are good too. You can also meet other coffee shop owners in the area. I'm friendly with a couple owners of places that are far enough away that we don't compete with each other.
It takes time to ramp up, but 100 orders a day is nothing. We do more than that in an inexpensive suburban strip mall. You can easily get into the hundreds in a high traffic location.
The key is to develop a base of regulars. Even a couple hundred of them is enough to keep the lights on.
We are open from 7:30-3 and do about $50k/mo. Work is like being at a party all day and cleaning up at the end. It’s the same people all the time so you’re basically hanging out and chatting with them all day.
The only thing that fixes it is to put the phone down. Do something else. Play video games. Read books. Go outside. Anything to stay away from the phone (but not TV). These phones are as bad as drugs.
I've been pushing to read a lot more books this year and it helps a lot.