I saw a great quote recently that said something like “Everyone loves work from home until you lose a deal to the competition that turned up to your customer in person.” There’s an element of truth to this.
Best advice I’ve heard is to say the draw for living in a city may go away but you need to be close. Living in the middle of nowhere isn’t going to look like such a great idea when people start gathering together again. Maybe not as much as before, but it will still happen. For these reasons I see why the suburbs are seeing a real estate boom in many areas. I’m much less sure about the long term move to places much further away from the cities.
Your customer is the person handing out raises, promotions, key assignments, etc. The person who makes it to happy hours will have the edge, fairly or not.
Raises, promotions and the like are not the way these days to make significant chunks of cash. It's job hopping every 1.5 to 2.5 years. In this case, there is no need to worry about promotions.
The way to rise in your career is to work on a string of high-value projects, not to slave away on the same codebase for years. When a VP has a great idea that needs a prototype delivered in 2 weeks, who is he going to go to? The engineer in the next office who he sees in the microkitchen every day, or the engineer working 2 timezones away who he never sees and doesn't know exists?
I think remote work will be a great option for the next 2-3 years, and then once the pandemic has receded and folks start switching from fear to greed mode, there will be distinct advantages to being near people with large budgets.
I got more from reading the source code of Emacs, Ultrix, Dynix and TeX,then eventually NCSA Mosaic and Linux than I ever did from almost any other "senior staff" that I ever encountered.
I would hope the same is true of the comparison between reading the source code of Ardour and meeting me in person.
You live in the middle of nowhere and appear on Zoom calls. The rest of your team meets with company leaders in person. Who do you think has the best relationship with the leadership? Not saying it’s impossible to do this remotely but when others don’t it becomes very very hard. Applies to everything, not just sales. Full remote works until someone breaks the chain, then everyone working remotely is at a disadvantage.
To add on top of that, what about just general travel or business travel?
I could understand moving away from the bay area, but living in a remote town has it's costs. Need to jump on a plane for a business meeting? Well, now you're driving 2 hours to the airport and then connecting to some hub.
I've done it in the past, it adds a ton of friction to travel.
Assuming you remove all "wasteful" travel, you're still causing more pollution living away from a major hub. Instead of a non-stop SFO to JFK flight, now you're taking a 1 hr Uber (or driving yourself) to a local airport, then taking a connecting flight to SFO.
Most people’s TVs at this point are basically a 1080 monitor hooked up to a computer (cable box) so I don’t see this as a big challenge. If a monitor is needed they are quite inexpensive at this point compared to what they used to cost.
The issue is that the Pi uses a relatively uncommon port (mini-HDMI) for their devices, and while the “Christmas Morning” kit that they’re selling includes the correct cable, it would’ve been nice if this larger device upgraded to use the far more common full-sized HDMI port. This way, they could’ve used a cable they likely already had available instead of needing something special or keeping track of a new cable.
Yes! This was such a terrible decision. At a first approximation, 0% of users will use two monitors. Including two HDMI ports on the board was a marketing gimmick ("look ma! two 4K monitors!"), which forced us all into a world of dongles and non-typical cables.
And HDMI itself isn’t a great choice if you’re hoping to let people use old monitors.
I have an old one with DVI and VGA, so I have a DVI-HDMI dongle and HDMI-HDMI mini cable and my first dongle didn’t work because the form factor of the monitor case didn’t allow it to fit. Quite a pain.
Of course DVI would rule out old TVs, so I don’t know what the “best” choice is, if there is one.
Is cable that common? Assuming you mean cable tv, it seems that at peak it was only just over half of all homes that subscribed and is falling. Presumably this is due to Netflix et al. However wiki numbers stop a few years back.
The point about it being hooked up to a cable box isn't particularly relevant unless you're only watching OTA digital TV all your media comes from what can be roughly described as a computer attached to a monitor. And even if you are just watching digital OTA TV any relatively modern TV will have an HDMI port.
Even without cable boxes, basically every TV has an input you can plug something into, even if you've got one of the extremely old ones you can get an adapter.
Please no more chatbots. Use the underlying tech to build a better search engine, but please stop recreating the concept of a search engine in a “chatbot.”
Whats frustrating is chatbots have the opportunity to be better than search. You can hold on to the conversation history as context for the next command and refine a search in a way a single command can't but no one seems to bother. As you say, chatbots are just poor search interfaces.
Chatbots are the wrong metaphor. Having a series of successfully refining queries is useful. Pretending that this happens through a dialogue with an intelligent interlocutor is false and misleading given the current level of technology. And hopefully it stays that way. As a biological human, I'm absolutely not looking forward having silicon & iron competition.
Its a hard challenge to create bots that have good UX and help users, even without taking context/history into account. A lot of companies are just focusing on getting that right, and delivering that value first.
But I think everyone building bots wants to go beyond that. I work on bots at Intercom and believe we can build bot experiences much better than traditional search.
At the same time, I think google search is heading a conversational direction - context now carries over between queries, and it seems like that naturally trends towards more conversational or agent interfaces.
It’s a legit risk to be basing anything on a Google product or service. Know too many stories of people or companies getting burned when Google wakes up one morning and decides to abandon another product.
One of the first examples there of not killing a product is "Inbox -> GMail Features" which is almost entirely misleading.
The biggest productivity benefits from Inbox, such as bundles and leaving notes directly in the inbox have not been ported. And of course the biggest benefit of Inbox was the clean interface itself. I still curse Google under my breath every day about them killing it off.
The first example (GPM -> Youtube Music) is a great example of why 'merged into other products' doesn't delegitimize complaints about Google killing products.
YTM (last time I checked) lacks feature parity with its predecessor, has a questionable migration path, and seems more interested in music videos that you can incidentally play as songs. It integrates messily with its host platform (hn comments on the last thread I read about it indicated that Google's algorithms were inadvertantly tagging unrelated content as 'music'), and dilutes focus on the prior project's core feature-set.
Just because another product's abstract contains some of the product I'm using's core doesn't mean I want to switch over to it because Google's got a short attention span, and wants to reimplement the product I'm using in the most approximate manner possible.
Half true. While they do merge old concepts into newer things in the process they tend to kill APIs that were in use and other key components that wrecks integrations with it uses of the original product.
A lot of companies do things like this where they pretend to be another company to scoop in business as a middleman. Recently googled a tradesperson and called the number on the top result that came up. It quickly became clear that I wasn’t talking to the outfit I was trying to call but someone trying to insert themselves in the middle and collect a fee. When I grilled them it became clear what was going on.
I eventually hung up and found a new number which put me in touch with the company directly. When I told them what happened they were like “yeah (insert name of one stop shop for home repairs) has been doing this... we have nothing to do with them but they keep trying to pretend we work with them and put out adverts under our name.” Super frustrating and I can sympathize with the restaurants where the same sort of thing seems to be happening.
The likes of Google could of course police this a lot better but they’re happy to take the money for the ads.
Clickbait headline. This is how it works with nearly all content you “buy” (music, movies, software, ...) You’re not buying the thing, rather you buying a license to use something. That license has terms. This is nothing new and nothing specific to Amazon.
Go watch that text that flashed up on your old VHS tapes. You didn’t own it, you merely had a license to use it in a certain way. Invite too many people over to your house to watch a movie, you broke the license as now you’re staging a “public showing” and you don’t have a license for that. Schools used to get in trouble for this sort of thing when some kid brings in a home VHS tape and plays it at “school movie night.”
>Clickbait headline. This is how it works with nearly all content you “buy”
Yeah...that's the entire point of the discussion being held.
When did it become a thing to call everything "clickbait"? The headline is literally a description of their argument, which is the point being discussed. Do you know what "clickbait" is?
The ability to broadly revoke these rights without any cause is different here, though. I don't think you can equate the two in the same way for this reason. You needed to take action against an individual before for a reason in order to prevent them from using the thing they purchased. In the streaming / heavy DRM case, no cause is required and no recourse is provided to the individual. You're just out of luck.
Clickbait headline. This is how it works with nearly all content you “buy” (music, movies, software, ...) You’re not buying the thing, rather you buying a license to use something. That license has terms. This is nothing new and nothing specific to Amazon.
A lot of companies that care deeply about security are moving to this “trust no one” approach which has the added benefit for end users of allowing access to “secure internal sites” over the plain old internet. If done right this can all be a big boost for security and improved end user experience. That said, the old “you need to be on the VPN” approach is going to stick around for some time.
For sure, VPNs will always be used. I think it'll take a BeyondCorp SaaS company to really take off (or have it become a more "Managed"auth method from the big cloud providers).
At Transcend we are able to do it because we had an early focus on protecting our internal apps, but obviously it's a lot harder to migrate hundreds of services than to start out with a newer approach.
I loved not having to use a VPN back when I worked at Google though, and am glad to see that the open source world is starting to offer some tools to play around with.
I mean, yes, if you have billions to dedicate to building a leading class security team-not all organizations have that money and not all organizations need to take that approach. Some do and some need to.
Not to sound harsh but the company just seemed to have the wrong leadership making the wrong decisions at the wrong time. Failing with a well capitalized streaming service during a pandemic is a bit like failing to sell ice cold lemonade to people in the desert. Sure there are probably other players, but if you’re not at least doing reasonably well then you’re probably doing something terribly wrong.
Best advice I’ve heard is to say the draw for living in a city may go away but you need to be close. Living in the middle of nowhere isn’t going to look like such a great idea when people start gathering together again. Maybe not as much as before, but it will still happen. For these reasons I see why the suburbs are seeing a real estate boom in many areas. I’m much less sure about the long term move to places much further away from the cities.