145 karma · joined August 10, 2020
But many tech companies are like that once they scale up.
Open source has a lot of overhead, and if you offer “enterprise” versions, others will compete with you, or worse, Amazon may offer your service for free as a bundle.
I’m interested in hearing your plan.
I thought the reference to field pioneers was a bit much, I wouldn’t have the blocks to do that with a straight face. I wish these app makers (see also Figma, AirTable) would refrain from making their self-aggrandizing “we’re bringing computing to the masses”; what a load of blocks. What you’re doing is creating a product (another silo in waiting) serving a market that presently is interested. This block model is also not unique (see WordPress and Drupal): Notion may be refining some of that in a more seamless experience, but this is a different kind of statement. Perhaps “we added collaboration to blocks” would be a possible claim for uniqueness.
Aside from this, I found the technical decisions interesting and worth a read.
My language is strict and statically typed. However, after arrays (tables are arrays of records conceptually) exceed a certain length, rather than processing them in-memory as arrays, they will be offloaded to storage and processed (transparently) in a streaming fashion.
I’m surprised that this doesn’t work well in PowerQuery. I would have thought that 100K would be peanuts for it.
Mine is a SaaS however, so the user’s laptop isn’t a constraint, and I can transparently throw a million records in BigQuery or some other data warehouse and use its aggregates if needed. Although at the 100K scale you can use SQLite and it can handle that scale of data trivially on commodity laptops.
So your experience is interesting indeed.
I'm very unhappy with their support, which is automated by bots and I've gone around in circles with such a bot.
Unfortunately their support plans are between a rock and a hard place. It's either[1]:
(1) Free, but garbage. (2) Starting at £1,400 per month.
The reason I chose Azure for my cloud provider was because Microsoft are obsessed with support, and I can get[2]:
Free, £21.62 per month, £74.54 per month, £745.31 per month for different levels of availability, response times, and assistance type.
I wish I could pay Stripe some amount per month to talk to a human who speaks English when I need it.
Or else, the first competitor to Stripe that offers this and I will jump ship. I already took a look at Paddle, but their approach with customers is equally appalling.
[1]: https://stripe.com/en-gb/support-and-services#compare-plans [2]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/support/plans/
A recent study I read about shows that spider intelligence is ill-studied but actually holds a wealth of interesting facets. Jumping spiders plan, such as when hunting, and can be surprised. They are also doing elaborate planning when building webs, and make adjustments to strength/stickiness in webs based on failed catches. It's sophisticated tool use. And yet their brains are teeny weeny puny things.
Another novel that you might enjoy if you haven't read is "A Deepness in the Sky", it's similar to Children of Time (and predates it), but told in a different way. Both are highly enjoyable and packed with ideas.