It has always been a challenging but highly rewarding experience for me. It is what you make of it - if you choose to be cynical about "very well off tech people", that's all you'll see. But Burning Man is multitudes. For me, it's about witnessing pure human creativity and playfulness. Your first time out on the playa at night will likely be one of those lifetime memories you'll appreciate having.
The page shows all green, which coincidentally is also how it looks when Azure is down. That page is for SLA/billing purposes, it won't show live incidents as they occur.
Just to be clear, I am talking about the suckers, marks, and rubes in the United States that believe blatant fascist propaganda and are so unbelievably and completely stupid and deluded as to support undermining the rule of law merely so that their political tribe can 'win'. You have learned nothing from history, future accounts (if we live through this) will paint you in a very poor light, and you should all be absolutely ashamed of yourselves. Unfortunately for you and I both, we will all likely suffer greatly due to your failings. Thanks.
I think that's actually a very interesting insight that would be helpful for PMs on GCloud to take note of. As a single founder, setting up Google Cloud, it's like they start out by assuming you're bigco, forcing (I assume most) of their users into a arduous process of removing components they don't need.
Google AI Studio is one of Google's solutions to this problem, but in typical Google fashion, it's bolted-on without any clear connection in the ecosystem. If you're also using GCloud, it's hard to remember it's even there.
OpenAI's platform, by contrast, is streamlined, easy to use. With Google, I feel like I need to wade through the documentation first before even using the darn thing.
This is a meme within Google already. People even complain that some internal tools assume you're serving a billion users when you just want to make a little webserver. But same with GCP.
> As a single founder, setting up Google Cloud, it's like they start out by assuming you're bigco
My impression of anything enterprise (big or small) related to Google is that they just don't care / value solving it.
Which is sad, because "How does an enterprise customer pay for X?" is a non-trivial and incredibly important UX problem.
They have great technical solutions, but these are hamstrung by a frankly amateur understanding of how companies (startups to Fortune 500s) need to sign up, pay for, and track things.
From an outside perspective, one of the biggest gaps seems to be that internal Google product teams don't have to dogfood the full GCP et al. project/org experience. They get prebuilt billing structures (or just get to avoid them with internal cross-billing).
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If I could waive a magic wand, Google would appoint an "Enterprise Czar", reporting directly to Pichai, who is a non-technical, retired founder / CEO.
That person would have one job: try to sign up, run (their team), and budget strategic Google initiatives (like AI) as a blind external party.
They would then deliver continuous reports to Pichai about how hard / easy this is.
Because potential Google customers don't give a shit if it's this internal team or that internal team's responsibility for integrating New Product X into GCP billing.
They care that the experience is terrible, filled with friction, and often flat out doesn't work.
Sergey's out spending $100 million to lobby against the billionaire tax in California. Lest his net worth shrink from roughly $250 billion to $237 billion. Can't become a pleb now! [0]
not that I'm intending to defend Sergey here but, if you could spend 0.04% of your net worth to protect 5% of your net worth (and probably all of your easy liquidity)... wouldn't you?
I think that argument should stop with advocacy for law. I have no problem with this when it's means playing optimally within the current laws, things like hiring world class tax attorneys. But if using your immense wealth to ensure the rules that everyone plays by favor you specifically, instead of the country/world, It feels like this is closer to bribing a judge than hiring a tax attorney.
I would normally agree with that, but in this particular case "everyone" is just over 200 individuals. And he could be opposing it on principle as well.
A one-off retroactive wealth tax is a rather questionable form of taxation even if (like myself) you are in favour of looking for ways to tax the super rich more effectively.
When I read about these one-off wealth taxes I find one thing really astonishing. The argument against wealth taxes in general is that people would change their behaviour, which would reduce the tax take over time. That's certainly true.
But then left wing economists believe that imposing it retroactively and calling it a "one-off" does not change people's behaviour. Technically, it cannot change their behaviour with respect to this specific taxation event.
But I find it utterly naive to believe that this sort of hit and run taxation will not change people's behaviour in other ways that would reduce tax revenues.
No one in their right mind would ever believe that a tax that brings in $100bn over 5 years will not have to be replaced by some other tax paid by the same group or by the somewhat less well off who decided to stay.
> if you could spend 0.04% of your net worth to protect 5% of your net worth
If I was anywhere near being a billionaire I wouldn't. There would be much better things to spend my time and effort on. That's not even counting the fact that I would probably care about the ethical aspect too.
0.95x of an obscene amount of money I can't spend is still an obscene amount of money I can't spend. That 5% wouldn't make any discernible difference in my life.
They’ll be back for the less rich people too until no more rich people are dumb enough to stay. Look at CAHSR. There’s no end to how much money California politicians can spend.
There’s not a revenue problem in California. There’s a spending problem.
I'm no OpenAI apologist here, but I appreciate this perspective. Apple definitely played their timing right for maximum pre-IPO damage. It gives them tremendous negotiating leverage on a possible settlement which could give them a chunk of OpenAI.
OpenAI did not launch any hardware (yet), and I don't think their IPO pricing hinges on them launching an iPhone competitor. To me, it looks like Apple wants to launch a similar AI hardware and is slowing-down the competition to be the first-to-market.
Funny thing: they are barking at the wrong tree here.
The risk is not hardware launch per se. It's the unresolved lawsuit from a powerful company that's hanging over OpenAI and what may be revealed if the case goes to trial and discovery. All that will get priced in by institutional investors. If OpenAI is shopping the IPO, it's likely among the first questions large investors performing due diligence will ask.
The worst scenario is OpenAI tells investors that the risks are low, there's nothing damaging, the costs are immaterial, and tries to push forward. Then the case goes to trial and emails, Slack messages, documents are revealed in discovery that run counter to everything OpenAI told investors. Court issues an injunction, awards damages, OpenAI has to dismiss execs, secondary lawsuits are filed, existing investors release letters they had no idea, underwriter backs out, etc. That outcome could crush an IPO.
I get this sometimes when I wake up at night and once or twice when looking in the mirror. A persistent notion that "wow, this is really weird to be in a body, what a weird experience!" It used to be a little scary, but as I've gotten older I've come to like it. I think it's funny that we call this state "dissociation", when, frankly, not one of us knows what the heck any of "this" is anyway. Is it "real"? What if the dissociative state is actually more like a temporary loss of the illusion of life?
To “be” in a body. What is “in” your body? You could also say “wow it’s really weird to be a body”. The whole self thing seems to be the illusory part. Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_contour. You see that white triangle, you experience it, but looking deeper you realise it’s not really there at all. That seems to be what we call “self”, as if it’s a real thing, but it’s not. These experiences are kinda like looking at that triangle, for a brief moment, you “get” it.
Your perspective locks in on a worldview where spirit / soul and body are intertwined and impossible to separate. There are positions that treat spirit and body as separate things, and I suspect the person you're speaking to has that perspective.
Generally the industry DOES lobby for regulation. In a deregulated industry, there's a rush towards the bottom - which means trust in the industry implodes. They don't want that. I don't believe the current administration is actually in line with the industry as a whole.
