So according to you: they should give up their paid seat so that you don't have to pay for assigned seats, even when you know way in advance that you are traveling with a 3 yr old?
Let's ignore special cases where you didn't have a chance to buy assigned seats, and focus on the vastly more common scenario where parents can easily pay to ensure seats of their choice.
Yes, it's nickel and diming by the airlines to make all seat assignments paid. And hating airlines is completely justified.
But I find the entitlement of parents, that other passengers should accommodate their parsimonious preferences, just amazing.
Interestingly, I feel the opposite for myself, as an experienced senior engineer.
I am doing more side projects, and finishing more projects, and feel a much greater level of confidence in starting new projects since I feel more confident that I will get at least an MVP working. These are not commercial efforts, I am just tinkering and scratching my own itches.
I attribute 3 reasons to this change:
- Vibe coding helps me do parts of the tech stack that I used to procrastinate on (UI, css)
- Gemini helps me solve all the inscrutable devops issues that used to block me in the past.
- A great open source tech stack that just works (Postgres, docker, node, ollama....)
AI helping me with the above has allowed me to focus on the "fun" parts of the side projects that I do. And the UIs also end up being much prettier than what I could create myself, which gives me the confidence to share my creations with friends and family.
I very much agree with this. I'm sure that dev culture as a whole has gotten less curious as it has gotten more mainstream. However, I think that the absolute number of curious devs has grown. There are ways to convert that advantage to replace what is lost, but it does take effort. Although, I suspect that it took effort to be in tech 20 years ago---people just forget that (or had more effort to spare when they were younger).
Serious question: Why don't you pay for YouTube premium?
Isn't it hypocritical to want YouTube to offer you its content for free? If the content is valuable to you, you should be willing to pay for it. If not, just stop watching YouTube.
It's not only hypocritical, it's nonsensical in this discussion.
It's obvious that if advertising was made illegal, we would need to pay for all those services that we want to use. YouTube premium is the best example of how that would actually work.
> If the content is valuable to you, you should be willing to pay for it
But I do, by supporting those creators through Patreon. Paying for YouTube Premium sounds like a bad deal since I'm not directly supporting the creators for which I go to YouTube in the first place.
The creators you’re paying on Patreon aren’t hosting their own videos though, YouTube is. Hosting videos isn’t cheap, who should cover that cost?
I get that YouTube doesn’t give enough of a percentage of profits to the creator, but the alternative should be a different video hosting platform that does give more profits to creators. Not patreon, which offers nothing in return. (It’s a glorified payment processor and doesn’t actually do any video hosting.)
That there are vanishingly few alternatives to YouTube in terms of actually hosting videos (I know of Vimeo and, I guess nebula? Only because it gets continually pushed on me by creators) maybe tells you that the act of hosting videos at scale is kinda hard to do profitably. Or else there’d be tons of alternative options.
I don't really care where the videos are hosted, though. I watch on YouTube because that's where my beloved creators choose host their vids. If they started to host their videos on Vimeo or even archive.org, I would watch them there since I only care about the content.
> Hosting videos isn’t cheap, who should cover that cost?
The ad revenue is in the billions and is steadily increasing each year. I would bet that the costs are more than covered.
> The ad revenue is in the billions and is steadily increasing each year. I would bet that the costs are more than covered.
You're changing the context of the discussion here. snailmailman had said:
> Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content [...] On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.
Saying they're unwilling to tolerate ads in YouTube. When asked why not just pay for YouTube premium, you came and said why you don't pay for YouTube premium. When pressed, you say "because YouTube's ad model will make them the money they need to host the videos."
Since you haven't said whether you block ads, there's two ways of interpreting this:
1. You don't block ads, you're ok watching YouTube ads, and you pay the creators directly through patreon. Great! But that makes your reply -- to why snailmailman doesn't pay for YT premium -- a little off-topic, because we were discussing ad-blocking.
2. OR, you're not ok watching YouTube ads, you block them, and then pay creators on patreon directly, meaning you don't care about covering the costs of hosting videos, because you don't believe YouTube should be showing you ads, and you don't want to pay them for the service. In which case we're back to "who should cover the costs." Maybe your answer is "other suckers, but not me", which is quite hypocritical.
I do block ads on YouTube, but I also block ads everywhere else without exception. I think that ads suck and that everybody should refuse to consume them. Not everybody is bothered by them, though, and they are not "suckers" for thinking so.
If YouTube were to offer me a service that I think is worth paying for, then I would. I think that YouTube Premium is not a product worth paying for based on what they're offering, and also I noticed that I watch YouTube videos less and less over the years. Nebula and Curiosity Stream convinced me to pay for their services, so perhaps YouTube just has to step up?
YouTube Premium dishes out your revenue to creators based on how much you watch. See Linus Tech Tips’ video on their income streams (skip to 4:40): https://youtu.be/GeCP-0nuziE?si=xH5gTvzglaPlQyJ4
Sure, YouTube probably takes more off the top than Patreon. But YouTube also splits it up based on who you’re watching. I probably watch 30+ YouTube channels per week, some of which I find on the explore page and don’t even know the name of. I would never subscribe to 30+ Patreons. I think YouTube Premium is a good compromise.
Maybe its hypocritical. But I have no issues with blocking ads on youtube on my PC, since 95%+ of the ads I see on youtube mobile are blatantly breaking Youtube's own TOS, if not breaking actual laws. I shouldn't be seeing these advertisements anyway if Youtube actually enforced their own policies. But I assume they'd rather advertise scams than miss out on a single empty ad spot.
I'm surprised Youtube hasn't faced any legal consequences for all the scams they allow to advertise on their platform. As far as I could tell, the ad I saw for a gun that was "easy to sneak past security" and "no license required" was up for well over a month, and I'm not convinced Youtube actually took it down. I saved that one, and as far as I can tell, the video ad url is still up, but now requires a sign in to view the video.
Landlords generally can't suddenly increases rents. It happens only at the end of lease, and everyone knows when the lease is going to expire, and you have 1-2 months at a minimum to negotiate the lease renewal. If a landlord suddenly increases the rent by a lot (although most leases, or city laws, cap max rent increases), it will be disruptive to you. But your worst case scenario is to move to another market price rental in 1-2 months.
For a landlord, a tenant who stops paying rent, damages the place, etc is a much bigger financial and logistical risk. In most places, it's a lengthy, high-effort process to evict a bad tenant even when you have documented evidence. This is a very difficult scenario for a mom and pop homeowner, hence rules should be different for them at least, compared to large corporations.
And in your good (but overzealous) intent to protect the general majority of good tenants, you're not realizing that thenet result of the above is:
- Landlords are hesitant to rent their places or ADUs unless they really need the money, which reduces supply, thus increasing rents
- Landlords have to charge higher to account for the risk of a bad tenant, as well as for a complex eviction process, thus increasing rents
Rent control like laws benefit current renters, in their current properties, while harming both landlords and importantly for your pov, future renters, including current renters in their next rental.
But since this cost is diffused to the future, it's easy to ignore and forget.
Anthropic has been on-and-off available on EquityZen.
I personally find the valuation expensive, but you do have the opportunity to invest if you want.
May I ask what you mean by this? They pay 20-500% more for the same #/% of ownership as other investors buying at the same time? Or do you mean they charge their customers such a high premium? Is there any data on this available?
I found Shogun the show to be relatively disappointing, after having read the book before. The book has a lot of nuanced explanations of people's motivations and philosophical/intelligent dialogue that the show just skips over, since they wanted to cover a huge tome in just one season.
This series deserved to be 2X longer to cover those imho.
Valid points. Is there a known solution to this, even if it's too expensive today?
Would it make sense for local electricity companies to go full solar with large battery backups? Or are batteries too expensive, or don't last long enough, for this to be feasible?
What about a wind+solar combination? Both of them are unlikely to go offline at the same time.
I see articles that the cost of wind and solar keep going down every year at a rapid rate, and the same for battery tech too. How far are we from where the costs are low enough for cities to have their own reliable grids composed of renewable energy?
The real solution is the dynamization of electricity prices. This needs some adjusting from your average consumer but not a lot if done right. In Germany there are startups like 1.5C, Enpal etc which will sell you a heat pump, solar, ev charger pack with some "smarts", switch you over to a dynamic pricing electricity contract and then claim to optimize the overall cost (i have no direct experience of my own). If you are willing to take a small amount of temperature swing your house is a big thermal battery (even more so if you have a heat pump to water with a big, well insulated reservoir), your ev is a battery with vehicle to grid. With this you can shift your main loads a good amount. Washing machines and dryer as well as cooking/baking might be slightly more problematic/harder to shift, though the car battery should be more than enough for average evening cooking and i have seen washing machines/dryers which can take an external signal as to run when the price is low/there is excess electricity...
The most sensible solution in the short term is to keep the distribution that we have in place and aggressively invest in large solar plants coupled with very large battery systems to ease the duck curve.
Individual homeowners can do their part with solar + heat pumps to shift that duck curve. Power rates should see way more wild swings: 0c at the trough around 11am-2pm, $.50 at the 5pm peak. That aligns consumers to make sensible investments, either the energy they use or the energy they produce/store.
Smart charging of cars, so that those car batteries can help shift the load? But that requires global coordination that is nonexistent today.
Solar is no doubt the energy solution, there's really nothing better. It's low maintenance and lasts a long time, capital scalable, and can be deployed basically anywhere. Solar is far and away the cheapest thing for about 70% of our energy needs. For the last 30% that is very tough to squeeze out -- that baseline power for 24/7 stuff like aluminum smelters, datacenters -- you basically have: high voltage transmission (only available if you have land to your west), big battery banks (tenable, but only if batteries follow solar's dramatic reduction in cost), or nuclear (but requires a big culture change that I cannot really imagine). Or fossil fuels but those are not good obviously.
Basically any of the other green stuff (hydro, wind, geothermal) can't be built at any price most places.
Sorry, capex for crypto -- let alone llm (datacenters must be on 100% of the time to pay nvidia) -- is way too high. It must see high utilization for amortization to be favorable.
You only see crypto in areas that have really cheap, 24/7 power. Big crypto mining operations are only built near remote hydroelectric power stations, or worse, natural gas or coal rich areas. Places where fossil fuels are made but that don't have easy/cheap access to refineries, rail lines, or pipelines.
You are probably right about LLM because barely anybody tries to use distributed compute (like folding at home was using).
But crypto is running 24/7 because energy price is still positive so people buy latest, most efficient hardware to be as efficient as possible. But latest hardware is expensive. You can buy prev gen mining hardware for peanuts comparatively. It can make you money if you run it when you have more energy than you can use or sell.
I am less sure about the Figma acquisition[1] in particular, but overall, I strongly agree with the general point that blanket blocking nearly-all acquisitions by Big Tech (except Microsoft for some reason) is wrong and short-term populism.
More startups and more innovation gets created when founders have higher hopes of a positive exit, and in turn, this is good for the world at large.
When a startup becomes FCF positive quickly, and can sustain their growth, they generally don't want to get acquired (eg: Facebook, Snap...) and generally aim for an eventual public IPO. But this is a high bar, which only a small number of companies reach.
The ones that do choose to get acquired, often do so because they are not as optimistic about their own sustainable growth as outsiders might think. If they can't make a reasonable exit via an acquisition, then their equity becomes zero and their years are wasted.
From a founder point of view, acquisitions act as a significant floor of value for the time and effort that the founders and employees are risking. This negative Expected Value risk taking drives innovation and growth for all, significantly curtailing acquisitions makes it severely more negative EV. Worse, the impact of this will not be felt immediately so the new FTC will be able to claim political and populist wins; it will show up in reduced startup creation in the years to come.
[1] Figma feels like it has a reasonable chance of surviving on its own, and become genuinely disruptive to Adobe in the future. But if it dies and goes to zero, then I will feel sad and unhappy that the acquisition was blocked.
Large companies growing even larger by acquisitions, and this being the standard exit for startups, is not good for the world at large. It only leads to concentrating more and more power in large corporations, and reducing meaningful competition in the market.
A startup being attractive for an acquisition is also quite different from being attractive to clients and users, and therefore that’s an incentive structure that is worse for clients and users.
Perhaps the government should make it a bit easier to go public, rather than restricting every other option. The SEC and FTC seem to be all-stick, no carrot.
> More startups and more innovation gets created when founders have higher hopes of a positive exit, and in turn, this is good for the world at large.
No, I disagree. It is a negative for the world at large if people are incentivized to build businesses solely so that they can be acquired by some big tech company.
Large players leverage their market position in anti-competitive ways to crush challengers, and this problem becomes more acute the larger the player gets.
Even if one hopes (unrealistically, IMO) that sufficiently-large hypercorps will save us from this fate by collapsing under their own weight, why not just cut out the middleman and break up the huge players now, rather than suffering under their market tyranny while hoping for it to happen on their own?
I would watch a documentary on what Microsoft had to do to get Activision. It seemed they spent a lot on the best legal team money could buy & on political capital as well. There were a ton of different angles too such as mobile gaming where Microsoft can't compete easily, studios where Microsoft has a lot, the Activision harassment fallout, the foreign competitors (Sony & Nintendo), cloud gaming competition.
Figma & Adobe had a lot less competition pre-AI wave so I understand the push back on that one. Especially due to Adobe's past on buying competition, killing it off & little innovation. Ironically now with all the AI startups I think Adobe has a lot of competition.
The Spirit/JetBlue airlines M&A being stopped is still my biggest head scratcher.
I personally think Figma & Adobe should have been allowed to merge though as companies like Affinity offer a very competitive product. I also was in favor of all the above M&As though.
Whereas I view them as risk distribution vehicles, which society has agreed to treat specially because society has also agreed that they are capable of producing sufficient good for society as a whole (in a variety of forms) that they may be treated specially. If for-profit corporations now only exist solely to make profit, and not to enable a sufficient distribution of risk so that things that actually benefit society can be made and done, then it’s time to reconsider that special treatment.
Looks like it uses yahoo_finance_api in rust. In theory that supports options, but no idea whether this tool handles that data properly, I didn't feel like searching that hard.
It's gonna take a lot to pry me away from my spreadsheets. They are simple and just work. Ages and ages ago I used MS Money but once they shut down I never migrated to the 'sunset edition,' just switched to excel. I keep trying things, but without local, automatic sync to my accounts, nothing is as simple and effective as a simple spreadsheet, for me.
My friend also developed almost continuous eczema for the past couple of years, and tried cutting out a large variety of foods from her diet to see what might be causing it.
Everything failed. And then, one day her normal brand of shampoo (which she had been using for 5+ years, and is advertised for sensitive skins) ran out, and she didn't get a chance to buy it for a couple of weeks. To her surprise, no eczema during those weeks! She changed her shampoo brand, and her eczema problems are gone, at least for now.
My point is, if you are trying to selectively eliminate things from your diet/lifestyle to figure out the trigger of your eczema, don't ignore things that you have been using for years before your eczema started.
Let's ignore special cases where you didn't have a chance to buy assigned seats, and focus on the vastly more common scenario where parents can easily pay to ensure seats of their choice.
Yes, it's nickel and diming by the airlines to make all seat assignments paid. And hating airlines is completely justified.
But I find the entitlement of parents, that other passengers should accommodate their parsimonious preferences, just amazing.
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