> Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year.
Apparently old enough to forget the details. I highly recommend refreshing your memory on the topic so you don’t sound so foolish.
1. Amazon had a very minimal amount of VC funding (less than $100M, pretty sure less than $10M)
2. They IPO’d in 1997 and that still brought in less than $100M to them.
3. They intentionally kept the company at near profitability, instead deciding to invest it into growth for the first 4-5yrs as a public company. It’s not that they were literally burning money like Uber.
4. As further proof they could’ve been profitable sooner if they wanted, they intentionally showed a profit in ~2001 following the dotcom crash.
Edit: seems the only VC investment pre-IPO was KP’s $8M. Combine that with the seed round they raised from individual investors and that comes in under $10M like I remembered.
> No they can't because they make stuff up, fail to follow directions, need to be minutely supervised, all output checked and workflow integrated with your companies shitty over complicated procedures and systems.
What’s the difference between what you describe and what’s needed for a fresh hire off the street, especially one just starting their career?
Real talk? The human can be made to suffer consequences.
We don't mention this in techie circles, probably because it is gauche. However you can hold a person responsible, and there is a chance you can figure out what they got wrong and ensure they are trained.
I can’t do squat to OpenAI if a bot gets something wrong, nor could I figure out why it got it wrong in the first place.
The difference is that a LLM is like hiring a worst-case scenario fresh hire that lied to you during the interview process, has a fake resume and isn't actually named John Programmer.
SLS was also my first distro. I also played with Yggdrasil Linux (bootable CD) for a while, because at the time, nobody could afford a hard drive with as much capacity as a CD-ROM.
Those early Linux distros borrowed a lot from SunOS (Solaris 1), so it was easy to adapt between work/home.
I remember downloading and installing one of the MCC Interim releases in 1993? 1994? before switching to Slackware. Early *BSD and Linux were certainly an adventure back then. I don't miss it.
It’s Jalopnik, it’s basically guaranteed to be poorly sourced and usually not supported with more evidence than a single tweet or Reddit post. Half the article is a ramble about the author never actually trying a Tesla.
The Hertz situation is in my opinion more their own fault vs Tesla. I’ve rented Teslas from them every time they were available when traveling in like 10-12 cities and all of them were poorly handled by local staff imho. As a Tesla owner from back when there was long wait lists (aka before the price cuts), I do sympathize with the insane depreciation aspect though.
First, I think they were just too far ahead of the market. I don’t think there are enough EV owners out there for this to work well.
I wouldn’t mind renting an EV, I’ve done it. But that’s because I’m an owner. I wouldn’t expect any random ICE owner to be ready to just accept one.
But from talking to my local Hertz (I asked him about this when I had to rent from them last year) basically no one in my area wants them. I assume very few of their customers are existing owners.
On top of that I know that they’ve had big problems because even though they’re saving a ton of normal maintenance the cost of scratch and dent/fender bender stuff is way higher than expected since only Tesla sells Tesla parts. Makes me think going with another brand would’ve been smarter on this specific point.
There’s of course anti anti-EV sentiment out there combined with anti-Musk stuff now. There’s no way that’s helping.
I think renting EVs is a good idea. I understand they chose Tesla both because they have the volume and the charging network. But I think that bit them on repairs and sentiment.
Mostly I think they were just a couple years too early. I think they thought the market would move faster than it has. I thought it would.
Once more drivers are used to EVs a lot of the problems go away. Then all your left with is charging and repair costs, both fully solvable.
> First, I think they were just too far ahead of the market. I don’t think there are enough EV owners out there for this to work well.
This is exactly the problem. They do zero education of substance to help a non-EV driver get used to the experience. If I wasn’t already an experienced EV driver (or intentionally using the rental as an extended test drive), I’d be super pissed personally as they really leave you hanging.
- Tesla themselves do this. If you book a test drive, you'll get emails where they tell you to watch a list of Youtube videos on how to handle the car. Nothing more will be done once you show up to do it - you'll do a little paperwork, you'll be guided onto the lot and maybe shown how to shift into D.
Same procedure when you buy one (source: i did) - paperwork, here's your keycards, follow me onto the lot, mount license plate, bye!
I mean - i get it, i neither want nor need a flower bouquet, a ceremony and some champagne when getting handed the keys to my new car - but something in between?!
- Other car rentals do it as well. We rented some Iveco van to move furniture from Europcar lately.
Paperwork, here's your key, this is the generic direction the van is. Enter van, be surprised it's automatic, start it up, shift into D, be even more surprised it has a second parking brake. Driving to the destination, another surprise: the car only goes up to 96km/h, no limiter seems to be active. Discover by accident that theres two driving modes: Eco and Power - switch to Power and you can drive faster facepalm.
> Same procedure when you buy one (source: i did) - paperwork, here's your keycards, follow me onto the lot, mount license plate, bye!
They offered to do way more for me, I politely declined.
> Tesla themselves do this. If you book a test drive, you'll get emails where they tell you to watch a list of Youtube videos on how to handle the car.
This is different though, you intentionally went in to drive a Tesla, that puts more onus on you. You didn’t go to pick up a Mazda and then got switched to a Tesla as an “upgrade.”
> Other car rentals do it as well.
I had the same thought and have used that point in debates in the past on this topic. For some reason, electric is different to people and they just won’t accept logic and reason. What’s different about getting a Tesla when expecting a Taurus vs getting a manual transmission diesel U-Haul truck when expecting automatic and gasoline?
I had one of the 36” Sony Wega Trinitron CRTs for years. Weighed well over 200lbs, which combined with the shape, made it a really “fun” thing to move.
The geometry was a killer when trying to move it because you couldn't wrap your arms around the thing. When faced with moving one by myself down the stairs to my apartment, I was forced to (carefully) roll it downhill.
When I was about 14, my mom got a new TV and I got the 27” Trinitron. I was simultaneously excited and terrified. I would have to move it.
My arms were too short to get around it. Somehow we made it down the basement stairs without help. By “we” I mean the TV and I. I got it across the room and onto the TV stand.
33 year old me would definitely need an Advil after.
I'll add my voice. I bought one from a friend for $36 (a dollar an inch) while waiting for flatscreens to come down in price. It bent my TV stand and I ended up keeping it a couple extra years because I didn't want to move it out of the house. Eventually we put it on Craigslist for free (with a warning about the weight) and two very large men showed up and carried it away.
Me too. It was an anchor. I had a couple of movers nearly drop it once. Getting it out of my house was a great accomplishment (I felt like a great weight had been lifted). At the time it was a definite improvement in video quality (IIRC my first real 1080p, coupled with HDTV) and I still find it crazy I can buy larger, better screens that are lighter and cheaper. Clearly, you can scale up tubes but it's just not going to win against LCD or LED.
It wasn't actually 1080p but 1080i, meaning it interlaced each field. It worked well for CRTs because of the way they operated, but it is a different standard.
I use a 55" 4k curved TV. The upper portion is too high to do computer work but I move unused windows up there. It's on a desk opposite the couch so I also use it as a TV.
Ignore the other commenter, there is no such thing as too big as long as there are enough pixels!
> there is no such thing as too big as long as there are enough pixels!
4K is absolutely too few pixels for 55” for me. To go 55”, I’d need at minimum 2.5x that many personally. As such a thing doesn’t exist, I use two 27” 5K monitors and endure the bezel divider.
Fun fact: it had a special "anamorphic" mode. You know how widescreen movies on 4:3 displays are cropped? Someone had the idea that maybe instead of cropping them, you could use all of the resolution must just direct the electron beam to display it on middle 3/4 (vertically) of the screen. There, an extra 33% better vertical resolution and brightness for free?
There weren't a whole lot of DVDs mastered that way, but when you could get one, and your DVD player supported it, and your TV supported it, it looked freaking fantastic.
That’s actually not true, the majority of widescreen DVDs were mastered in Anamorphic format. The players themselves were then responsible for squishing down to letterboxed or doing an automated form of “pan and scan” which most people thought was terrible. If you were lucky though, you had a TV capable of doing the anamorphic adjustment and then you’d get the higher resolution as you stated.
32 is enough that you need to rotate your head if you want to see all parts of the screen. I have a 32" 4k screen and its a bit annoying, I get cricks in my neck, so I tend to only really use a centre 1080p sized area on the screen, with my winXP era wallpaper showing through around it.
Tbh I'll prefer 27" 4k.
43 might be a bit better because you can move the screen a little farther away.
Surely it depends on the sitting distance? I have 2 27" 19:10 screens next to each other and do not need to move my head to see all parts of the screen.
I found a 32" on the curb, heaved it into the back of my truck, and got it home.
It worked great, I thought about how much of a pain it would be to drag into the house and up the stairs to the gaming room, and decided I'd just find a 19-27" to use for old consoles.
I had the 32" high-def XBR model (it did 1080i which WRAL in Raleigh was broadcasting). It weighed 211 pounds, of which about 3/4 of it was the front glass. Like the other poster, when it was time for it to leave, I had to carefully slide it down the stairs on some cardboard. Just too heavy and awkward to carry.
I bought it at Best Buy. They had put it off on an aisle and not next to all the new LCD and Plasma TVs they were selling. Likely because it had a much better picture than those early flat-screens and was $1200 vs the others that started at $1800 and quickly went up from there.
We inherited one of these from my in-laws, it was a beast. After about a year, it finally died so my son and I loaded it up and took it to Best Buy for free recycling. (this was about 15 years ago.) When the clerk come out with a trolley to collect the tv, we offered to help, but he said he would get it and that was that. I was impressed.
My BIL had one of those. He asked me to help bring in his new bazillion inch LCD so I drove over. Turned out the first task was to move that old CRT into his basement...
As someone who was part of the developer community and had multiple of the prototype devices, both phone and tablet, I can say it’s not because of the software they lost to Apple, it’s because of the hardware. The hardware was plain inferior, even for the era.
I think the critical miss of that era was Research in motion not buying palm. I think that combination could have had a real shot of staying relevant. Rim basically already made hardware that would have worked and had tons of corporate support because of blackberry messenger. The patents between the two would have also been quite strong.
Need to try this directly before passing judgement, but this can unlock a few project ideas I have if the quality lives up to the examples with this low of resource requirements.
1. You aren’t a troll posing as a human
2. That if you are a human, that you won’t die in the next hour.
3. That if you don’t die today, that the Earth won’t be impacted by an asteroid this year.
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