Yes, zero Forex fees cards work. But the terminal detects that your home currency is different to the local currency and you still have to choose the right option.
For example, just the other day I fat fingered the screen and chose the wrong currency.
TikTok is a fluke, created by the condition of how it was originally born as Douyin in China. It is also the only app that translated well from the domestic China market to international markets.
Being backed by lots of VC cash and Bytedance's revenues in China is a key factor in getting TikTok established overseas.
TikTok is the most prominent one, for a number of reasons, but other platforms that pioneered or copied the format also reached considerable prominence. Instagram Reels, Snapchat Stories, etc. And tellingly, when YouTube wanted to compete, they needed to build an experience quite separate from the rest of the site. There is a qualitative difference in how people perceive and consume this type of content. It's not just "vertical YouTube".
Of course each one of these platforms was backed by VC or stock market money, but that's the nature of the industry. Over the years, VCs ended up throwing a lot of money at Google and YouTube killers and that didn't get them anywhere, so that in itself isn't the winning formula.
Vine had more active users than Musically, and look what happened to Vine. It would have never had the investment internationally if not for the blow-out success it had inside Mainland China.
Combination of factors, but mostly the success Douyin had in Mainland China leading to the investment in TikTok internationally, given that no other Chinese social app had reach this level of penetration.
The reality is that hacking code isn't always beautiful. Most of the time, it is mundane grunt work.
You can always leave the core logic for your to work on and have the AI handle all the bits that you don't like to do. This is what we do for modelling for example, AI helps with the interface and data backends, the core modelling logic is hand-crafted.
Yup. I think programmers are giving themselves too much credit here. I love programming, but let's not kid ourselves, at most organizations at least 75% of the code needed to make something a working product is BS. I'd rather prompt an LLM agent to take care of that while I review it so that I can spend my limited energy on the more interesting bits. I find the exercise of prompting an LLM to generate boring code to my exact specifications far more intellectually stimulating than doing any of that stuff by hand, and the time that I have invested in this area has paid dividends in making the code cleaner, more consistent, and more coherent.
Sounds like you really like code reviews. You must be a unicorn.
I find most programmers don't like code reviews. They do it because it's required by their job and most will just click the approve button. Or I guess in a more dysfunctional org, argue about formatting or something, which should just be done automatically so that nobody has to even think about it.
What they like doing is the coding and problem solving.
And now you want to make programming into code review?
> Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'.
This is also the type of search that Google makes no money from.
The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader.
>Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago
Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
You can't really blame the prevalence of SEO slop on Google. It's not the lack of want of trying, it is hard technically (see how long it took to develop modern AI capabilities), expensive computationally (as we can see with the unsustainable cost of test-time search in ChatGPT) and in terms of user-experience.
>Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo
Really, it isn't. Google is in the unique position of being the closest technology company to achieving full vertical integration of their value chain, from silicon to software to data to end-users. They are also at the forefront of frontier AI, including productising the research output. I don't really get the Google hate on HN, apart from maybe the YC/sama bias.
Your answer sounds very artificial. For instance "AI" is in no way whatsoever required for natural language search queries. There was some spreadsheet program back in the mid 90s that even supported natural language operation description - and is something that should also be obviously supported now a days. Even the adventure games of the same era often had natural language interfaces. It was quite useable even if obviously severely limited by minimal R&D put into it.
It was an obvious way to create a better user experience but instead search today is comparable to, if not worse than, search 20 years ago - because at least 20 years ago companies were ahead of the SEO guys, whereas that relationship has long since flipped.
What makes you think that Google hasn't developed natural language processing, when they launched Google Translate in 2006?
Also, what makes you think that NLP would solve the problem you're describing? Only LLMs has proven that it could fully understand and process the queries in the way you're describing, hence why I brought that up. However it is expensive computationally, and only recently was it even technically possible to do.
Most searches, even in natural language, are extremely simple. Google could certainly have added this functionality, but they chose not to. This is how old giants always die. They become so obsessed with further squeezing their users that they begin to stagnate, decline, and eventually completely miss the writing on the wall - and face disruption.
I will tell you all you need to know about Google - I was doing some research for a product I am building, my daughter (age 12) was an inspiration for what I am building and I asked her if she had time to help me with something and she did. Told her to “google ____” and she started laughing HARD and called me a boomer for suggesting she use Google… :)
These aren't incompatible issues. Google has a monopoly maintained by excessive and illegal anti-competitive practices. The majority of users have no clue how to even change their default search engine, which Google actively exploits. Just checking it out - it took no less than 6 clicks into various specific menu and sub-menu settings to do so.
Poll only the subset of people that are actively aware of how to change their search engine and I suspect Google's dominance suddenly completely disappears. Remember, there was a time when Internet Explorer was the leading web browser across all age groups. Then Microsoft was forced to make it easier for people to change their default browser, and suddenly nobody was using IE anymore.
My apologies, I did not mean to imply that my kid's humour is evidence of Google's demise. But it does make you wonder a bit... we use Google out habit (they used to be decent) and also because they pay boatload of money to be default search on iphone and myriad of other reasons but younger generations do not have that intimate relationship with google and can see "with fresh eyes" its usefulness compared to the alternatives ...
> The money is in searching for up-to-date relevant product information, where Google is the undisputed leader.
Actually for products, a lot of people just go to Amazon has a thriving ad business.
> Google is one of the major AI research outfits, and arguably the only one that continues to deliver consistently over the last 2 decades. Statistical Machine Translation/Google Translate, Adwords Quality Score, TensorFlow, AlphaGo, Attention is all you need (Transformers), AlphaFold all Google innovations.
The problem with Google is that they can’t produce good profitable products. Innovation means nothing for a for profit company if it doesn’t make money.
Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you.
>searching for up-to-date relevant product information
I realise I'm not a typical user, but I would never trust Google for any searches hinting that I'm looking to buy something, because the results are almost guaranteed to be inorganic. Someone will have paid Google money to be promoted for "best clothes dryer".
>Easy. Google is basically spyware. It's an advertising company, and their product is you.
This is such a flippant and facile response.
Google isn't a advertising company, it is a tech company that gets the majority of its revenue via selling advertising. This can change, and also likely to change in the next decade or so.
The reason things are is that nobody was willing to pay for search - it's a product with a very low incremental cost. The market dictated this operating model, and nobody has been able to upend this model so far, not even OAI. The numbers just don't work out. Do you think OAI can continue to subsidise free ChatGPT queries with paid ChatGPT Plus subscriptions? Almost certainly not.
I think actually people probably are willing to pay for search - Google just did such a damn good job for so long it made it impossible for a competitor to pop up
And now that their core product is getting worse I am paying for search
How else should someone take the statement 'that is the type of search that Google makes no money from' when someone explained what type of searches they do? If Google doesn't make money from it, they don't develop it for search apparently, which is why they haven't progressed in search beyond advertising. You can argue that it needs disrupting, but concluding that 'they make their money from advertising' when that was directly stated by you is not flippant or facile, it is deduction.
You can't eat your cake and still have it. If they refuse to develop an income stream that isn't related to advertising while using practices that use their dominant place in the market to buy other technologies or shut them down, then saying it isn't their fault that the revenue is only advertising is either disingenuous or naive.
>The individual writing this guide appears to have only had barely two years in a hard 'management' role, according to their LinkedIn. How can they possibly be qualified to give advice on a subject that takes years and years and years of developing and refining soft skills, let alone consulting on the particulars of leading people in that time? Might as well run for President. What arrogance thinking they can go into an organization and infect it with the Tech-leadership-style-du-jour and think they've done some good.
The skills in leadership don't start developing when you become a 'manager' at work, it starts developing around the time you lose your baby teeth, maybe even before. From personal experience, there is little correlation between the amount of time spent in 'management' and how much one understands leadership.
> In practice the best managers care primarily about politics and growing their personal stake in the organization.
This is fine, and expected of senior management.
> I've found that the more clueless they are the better (just don't point that out).
This is toxic. Management at the senior level of these organisations has been completely detached from the activities on the ground.
A healthy functional organisation should have senior managers that understand the complete stack of layers, but especially at the level where the value is being generated they need to fully understand.
For example, just the other day I fat fingered the screen and chose the wrong currency.