Full disclosure, I worked many years at Fitbit, in a very senior role.
The reason you want Whoop to have a subscription (and why I wear a Whoop now) is because it incentivizes the company to ship great hardware _and_ software. If you don’t have a subscription, your company becomes stuck on the treadmill of needing to have a new device to sell to the public every year (or even twice a year) so that you can continue to fund your business. Pebble found this out, too, and it led to their sale eventually.
Worse, the launch dates are not movable. People are largely not going to wait and buy your new watch in January if they wanted to get a Christmas gift for their spouse. The same goes for Mother’s Day. The scope is also not movable, because it has to have certain things for people to be interested vs last year’s model. We all know what happens when you fix scope and date in the iron triangle — quality suffers.
The subscription model has a great property — you can ship the device to your customers when it’s ready and meets your quality bar, and you can theoretically do it for free, because they are already paying a subscription. I realize Whoop did not take this path with their latest device release, they are clearly trying to goose their revenue for a quarter or two. That said, at the end of the day, their full product offering will either earn your subscription or not, which means that you can be confident that they are aligned with your interests. You generally cannot say that about a pure hardware company, unless they are remarkably disciplined with respect to hiring. I have not seen an example of this in the wearable/health space.
I think you can derive a general principle from this, which is that if a company is incented to sell you crap, they will eventually do so. If instead they are required to repeatedly earn your business, they will either maintain high standards for their products or they will go out of business. I mostly choose to spend my money on products made by companies with the latter model.
“Radiologists do far more than study images. They advise other doctors and surgeons, talk to patients, write reports and analyze medical records. After identifying a suspect cluster of tissue in an organ, they interpret what it might mean for an individual patient with a particular medical history, tapping years of experience.”
Now think about how much of software development is typing out the code vs talking to people, getting a clear definition of the problem, debugging, etc. (I would love an LLM that could debug problems in production — but all they can do is tell me stuff I already know). Then layer on that there are far more ideas for what should be built than you have time to actually build in every organization I’ve ever worked in.
I’m not worried about my job. I’m more worried my coworkers won’t realize what a great tool this is and my company will be left in the dust.
Fwiw I think this is not true right now. It might be true in the future, I guess. Today you have to learn some pretty specific techniques and they don’t come naturally to most engineers I think. They are accustomed to one-shot Google searches, not prompt engineering. Yes, you can learn how to prompt engineer, but it takes trial and error. A lot of my co-workers today still believe the LLM is useless because it hallucinates API definitions. They very much are not used to tools that require the level of hand-holding you need today.
Either teaching them is going to get easier, which is somewhat plausible actually — or you think LLMs are going to get dramatically easier to prompt with more reliable output. I actually think that’s somewhat implausible. Log(compute) is a pretty hard number to move past a certain point and it seems we’ve hit that point already. RLHF is great, but it doesn’t scale well and the result is that some tools are hard to build. Giving me millions of context tokens is neat, but if it’s wildly expensive and confuses the model on top of that, it’s not actually useful.
I do think there is room to improve and of course there are new techniques to be discovered. The models may even help discover some of them, although I am skeptical that they will find Everest by hill climbing when they’re currently on Pike’s Peak. Or maybe we really need to find Olympus Mons.
Lol, this is going over my head a bit, but in case I was misunderstood, I had a role once that was secops adjacent but not strictly "security," just ended up doing a lot of favors for a security team. There was a recommendation that was super low hanging with extremely high impact, but the sec team determined it was "too low risk to action on without better reasoning" or something, they got hit pretty hard by it and I was involved in some triage, shaking my head the entire time. Very similar reasoning. "I need a bulletproof reason to update or change something" is like, to me, not a productive attitude.
Ha ha, "too low risk to action ..." When I was younger I would fight those valiant fights, now only if actual end users would suffer irreparable harm, I give me people my advice, but when the pedantically push back and MAKE YOU MAKE THEM UNDERSTAND, Nawww, I told you what I think and why, I am done.
My comment condensed an exchange that has happened enough times to be a trope. You try to discretely get someones attention to alert them about an opsec issue, you then whisper and they basically look right at the target and then yell back at you WHY ARE YOU WHISPERING. Nawww, you are on your own now.
I get this a lot with AI now, I tell people what is a current capability and what the curve looks like, I send them a gist of those capabilities and they want to get into some goal post moving debate. I don't engage. I don't care about being right, or being taken seriously. The funny thing is, sometimes when they come back months later with a, "hey it turns out ..." that they want me to say I told you so, or glad you turned around. I literally don't care.
I and the world have suffered so many fools, we have to stop giving them the time of day, for ourselves. They don't realize that they have truly lost when people stop giving them advice or criticism. You know the relationship is over when the other party has zero interest in even engaging in any capacity.
Sorry but while I won’t argue the battery life angle, you really cannot say that the PebbleOS offers significantly more functionality than WatchOS. It just ain’t so.
Honestly, you have done the most superficial thing here. It’s fine, but K is much more interesting in terms of encoding ideas differently than ALGOL style languages, just as one easy example.
The reason you want Whoop to have a subscription (and why I wear a Whoop now) is because it incentivizes the company to ship great hardware _and_ software. If you don’t have a subscription, your company becomes stuck on the treadmill of needing to have a new device to sell to the public every year (or even twice a year) so that you can continue to fund your business. Pebble found this out, too, and it led to their sale eventually.
Worse, the launch dates are not movable. People are largely not going to wait and buy your new watch in January if they wanted to get a Christmas gift for their spouse. The same goes for Mother’s Day. The scope is also not movable, because it has to have certain things for people to be interested vs last year’s model. We all know what happens when you fix scope and date in the iron triangle — quality suffers.
The subscription model has a great property — you can ship the device to your customers when it’s ready and meets your quality bar, and you can theoretically do it for free, because they are already paying a subscription. I realize Whoop did not take this path with their latest device release, they are clearly trying to goose their revenue for a quarter or two. That said, at the end of the day, their full product offering will either earn your subscription or not, which means that you can be confident that they are aligned with your interests. You generally cannot say that about a pure hardware company, unless they are remarkably disciplined with respect to hiring. I have not seen an example of this in the wearable/health space.
I think you can derive a general principle from this, which is that if a company is incented to sell you crap, they will eventually do so. If instead they are required to repeatedly earn your business, they will either maintain high standards for their products or they will go out of business. I mostly choose to spend my money on products made by companies with the latter model.
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