A bit surprised OpenAI didn’t acquire coda. Solid leadership team and the product would be a nice complement to OAI’s current portfolio. Lots of AI usage will seamlessly live in productivity tools which means OAI is disintermediated at point of use by its biggest rival Google (workspace) or its frenemy MSFT (office). Coda’s tools seemed well built and available for a fraction of the cost of buying eg Notion.
There were back in the day. Apple really screwed up the development story for the watch as the initial watches just couldn't really do apps. They should have waiting for Series 3 before introducing apps and they still could do a lot to make things easier for devs.
This seems like terrible legislation. Yes, part time gig workers are exposed to harms that employees don’t face (i.e. lack of health insurance). But the ability to work flexibly and between lots of companies has huge upside for them and for firms. Why not tax companies who use these workers and put the tax revenue toward a special health insurance / social safety net specifically for gig workers? Mitigates many of the downsides and preserves flexibility.
Sure—that seems like it can in certain instances be a great system. In general I think a fair/free labor market means individuals should have as many options as possible, including a government backstop, to leverage when negotiating with firms who want to buy their time.
I’m not sure I agree with the last line that these groups prize unity at the expense of truth. My takeaway from the rest of the article is that trust (performed as social cohesion) is the underlying social value that we are actually talking about in many of these conversations. Both verifiable truth (e.g. scientific predictions that we can trust) and fictions (e.g. elaborate stories that give us a shortcut to trust, as mentioned in the article) play a part in building trust. Successful organizations understand the right mix of truth and fiction to inspire trust—the morals of bible stories are powerful because they are “true” for many people to the extent that seem to reflect many people’s day to day experience. So, rather than unity vs truth, maybe we should think of unity as a function of a variety of strategies, one of which is truth? And successful organizations as ones that find the right balance?
It seems like they're following the "Donald Trump" strategy of publicity: (1)do something scandalous (2)get picked up by mainstream media for a cycle of handwringing/counter-handwringing, (3)profit (in form of outsize impact): you have the left angry, the right banding together in indignation, and the truly undecided unsure if what they're seeing is this "fake news" they've heard about. No billions required.
I hope other companies follow Stripe's lead here. Anecdotally, I've never been as happy and productive as I've been the past few years as a remote worker. It seems to me too few companies are taking advantage of the opportunity here. The few challenges I've encountered seem solvable:
(1) effective team culture building: can be solved with travel budget & prioritization of good team cultural norms by team leads
(2) whole team collaborative brainstorming (particularly when facing a "fire drill"-type time-constrained challenge): more challenging to solve from what I've seen, but might be solved by some combination of better tech and better work practices
I'm interested to hear how Stripe addresses these and which challenges they find.
One question at a higher level: what are the immigration law impacts here? Does Stripe need to get H1Bs for internationally located workers? I hope not: effective remote work is fantastic step toward bringing labor mobility more in line with capital mobility, with potentially positive effects on income, taxation, and social policies for people around the world.
We have talented lawyers and comply fully with employment-related requirements everywhere we do business. These get rather nuanced, particularly when factual situations get complicated, but if we weren't ready to implement complex state machines and handle edge cases then we picked a really poor line of work.
Generally speaking, most Stripes work for a subsidiary which hires them in the standard fashion for professional employees in their jurisdiction. For example, I work for Stripe Japan, K.K., and demonstrated/maintain authorization to work in Japan. We can and do support people moving internally, including regarding immigration status where appropriate.
While it's not sufficient, travel budget is an important element IMO. I'm more or less remote but the ability to get together multiple times a year with both formal team members and other people who I collaborate with is pretty important to me. Also just getting out of the house to have regular contact with other people in the industry. I suppose, I could more proactively do more local events but, generally, I find interacting with people at events an important part of working remotely.
H1Bs are used for non-immigrant workers to be allowed to work on US territory. So no, no need for H1B if workers live and work from a different country.
Well, they're probably ongoing challenges that any company needs to consider--and I'd argue that culture and communications can be challenges even within a company location as it scales. I'd shy away from ever saying they're "solved."
But the fact that there are successful companies with a significant percentage of remote and/or distributed workers suggests that they can be solved well enough.
There are plenty of very successful 100% remote companies, including GitLab, Zapier, Automattic (Wordpress) etc. I think it's fair to say they've solved it well enough.
Traditional office space also comes with its own fair share of challenges and problems.
I deleted it Jan 1 2018 and am trying to decide whether to reactivate Jan 1 2019. No part of me misses News Feed or mindless scrolling, but Events and Groups have become an essential part of discovering and organizing social events for my peers (I’m late 20s, live in Europe, am in grad school). I don’t think I will reactivate, but I find it interesting that those have become the “stickiest” part of Facebook: I have so many other channels for close interaction (email, text) and interaction with strangers (Twitter, Medium) but that mid-range acquaintance circle is most easily accessible (only accessible?) on Facebook
In all of these deal announcements, the key words are “up to”. That’s very different from a confirmed 62k order, and in all announcements related to that agreement timing of delivery was unconfirmed [0].
[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/business/waymo-chrysle...
This is a bit of a let down and suggests to me that either they are not confident in the tech arriving at scale any time soon or they are not serious about directly challenging Uber. These are expensive vehicles and not custom-designed for a self-driving transportation service. I would be surprised if they were much cheaper per ride than Uber in cheap markets.
If they were serious about taking on Uber/Lyft soon I would expect them to be willing to make a bet on a long-life, extremely cost-focused custom vehicle. Maybe this is a stop gap to keep proving the tech until someone else (Uber?) gets impatient, licenses their tech, and spends the vehicle capital.
The cost of the kit Waymo will add to the cars is surely more than enough to make any vehicle choice quite expensive by conventional standards.
It shouldn't matter too much though, drivers are very expensive compared to cars. Not paying a hypothetical Uber driver $100 a day could easily finance a supercar, let alone a Jaguar. And the autonomous car can work triple shifts.
Why can't they have both low cost and premium versions? Even if going high end first is the strategy here (I'm not sure it is considering them getting deals for outfitting Pacifica's), Tesla focused on the premium market first and was able to create a luxury image that makes the mass market crave it.
Google are going to scope out basic partnership agreement frameworks with the companies interested in making partnership agreements with them, and if that happens to be a premium vehicle manufacturer then so be it. If they wanted to invent a new kind of "long life, extremely cost-focused vehicle" it would take them much longer anyway, and be entirely unnecessary to successfully challenge an app company making a loss in most markets and running out of runway. What really matters is if, when and where Waymo have self driving tech adequate and legal for commercial operations.
In the unlikely event of Waymo actually ordering 20k Jags, the economies of scale they'd get would be enormous even compared with non premium Uber vehicles bought on finance at dealer prices even before the driver gets paid, and many taxi markets use premium vehicles by default.
It read as a positive to me. Uber is losing in Asia and here's Google partnering with Jaguar who's owned by Tata Motors. This sets Google up for North America, Europe, and Asia.
For a self driving taxi, I don't understand the need for a cost focused option.
I bought the series 3+LTE hoping to get a device that would allow me to leave my phone home when I went out at night. After getting stranded one too many times when the Uber and Lyft apps both failed, I abandoned that dream. Hopefully broader watch adoption and watchOS 5 fixes this (I’m not sure which exactly is causing the problem). Judging from conversations with my friends, I’m not alone. It seems like “ability to reliably hail a ride” is key functionality for any technology that hopes to replace a phone in any meaningful part of someone’s daily/nightly routine in a place like San Francisco.
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